All: apologies for the interruption, but don't miss that there are multiple pages in this thread, with over 2000 posts by now. You have to click through the More links at the bottom to see them all. Later pages have all kinds of stuff that is just as interesting. It's kind of incredible.
(We intend to get rid of pagination once the next implementation of Arc is ready.)
If you do make it monthly, my recommendation is posting it on the 15th of every month, to stagger it with the other regular threads. This way you don't make the start of the month a scramble of postings.
Mondays could also work, since it would allow people an extra weekend to finish what they want to show. Also it will allow them to procrastinate at work.
I'd say the Saturday after the paycheck closest to the 15th. People on bi-weekly pay schedules have funds again and it's counter cyclical to the 'Who's Hiring' threads.
Sunday might be good because then the question "what are you working on" is associated with what you might be working on over the weekend, i.e. things you're doing for curiosity, fun, or obsession, rather than a workaday job.
Replies to this top comment have been quite a job to juggle. My approach has been to reply and then detach them, so as to minimize distraction at the top of the thread. Unfortunately, that has led to the same questions being asked over and over, so I'm going to move all the replies underneath this stub, and then collapse it. The reason for a stub root comment rather than just collapsing all the replies is that a list of dozens of collapsed replies would take up most of the page.
I'm also going to partition them by topic, since there are so many.
Not necessarily. I seem to remember that HN used to be without pagination, all the comments were just listed on one page (without any JS to load more comments etc) but servers started to struggle when HN got more users which led to sometimes too many comments, so they added the pagination.
Somehow I associate this with the thread when Steve Jobs died, but not sure how accurate that is. My memory is kind of sucky.
What is endless about it? You’d assume there will be a finite amount of comments when you load the thread page, and the new implementation can just render that.
As with many things in "modern" web development, "endless-scroll" is not really endless (as nothing is endless). It's a technique similar to how Facebook, Twitter and others continue to automatically load content when you reach the bottom, giving the impression of "endless" content. Of course, even Facebook and Twitter would eventually run out of content to show, but somehow that pattern got the name "endless scroll".
See also: isomorphic, real-time, serverless and countless others examples of poorly named concepts in web development.
I know the feature they alluded to, thanks for the explanation. Comments on a thread are finite at any moment in time though, you wouldn't find "related content" as you were scrolling a specific thread page on HN. That was my point.
I was very surprised when I first found out FB would run out content. I had assumed that it would just go further back in time, even if the feed was not strictly chronological.
Oh I certainly didn't mean HN would do infinite scrolling. That'd be gross, too complicated, and would contradict the old-web style of the site. But if we can just generate entire pages quickly enough, I don't see why we wouldn't go back to doing that.
As a quick fix, can you add a hyperlink to the next pages at the top of the page [“Page 2”, “Page 3”], rather than just a single “More” hyperlink at the bottom of the page?
People frequently think that their comment has been deleted because it doesn't show up on the first page. We introduced it as a performance workaround, so if performance recovers, I'd rather stop. If rendering the whole page causes other trouble, we can reconsider the problem from scratch.
Why would pagination be a good idea? From my perspective, there's no downside (HN is exclusively text and fetching+rendering the entire first page of comments for this submission takes the same amount of time on my computer as rendering a no-comment submission) and several upsides (no need to open several tabs to see all comments, no need to make several more round trips and wait several more seconds per page of comments, no "attention cliff" where comments on the n+1th page are significantly less noticeable than those at the bottom of the nth page, allow pagination to be handled by user agent/browser instead of being enforced by server).
The downside is having to serve larger pages which consist primarily of content which will not be read. This site is running on some resource-limited hardware as I understand it, so limiting the maximum potential size of each page served means more pages can be served more quickly, especially if you just cache the first page of a thread (which is all most people will engage with) rather than the entire thread.
You're confusing cause and effect - most people only interact with the first page of comments because they're on the first page, and they don't want to click through. If you disable pagination, then suddenly far more people will read those comments that would be on the second page.
Additionally, request count matters more than data transferred. It's much easier to serve 1MB to each of 100 users than 1KB to each of 100K users. n people are already going to view the comment thread for a submission - a several-dozen-KB increase in the amount of data that you send each of them (assuming you're serving them statically) results in anywhere from "little" to "imperceptibly" additional CPU load.
More an example of how using the perfect programming language for your project allows it to succeed, thrive, and eventually meet the challenges of growth :)
HN wouldn't exist without Arc, so it's pointless to argue about this. But I love talking about it so I'm going to anyway.
The feedback loops between the language, the HN software, and the living system of the community go very deep. I could write a lot about that. It's one of the most interesting things about the project, though unfortunately not visible. The software just works its Lispy magic behind the scenes, remaining small and malleable. It's still only 15k lines of code, including the language implementation, and that code does a lot.
On performance, it's pretty cool that Arc has managed to run HN through 12+ years of growth without much optimization. It's a good sign, not a bad one, that we're only doing major rework for performance reasons now. HN is far from Reddit-scale, but still: the application runs on a single core. (Though we do cache pages for logged-out users and serve those from an Nginx front end.)
As long as we're on the topic, consider this: the software for both HN and YC was just a single Arc program (and not a large one) for the first 9 years of their existence, during which they went from nothing to massively successful to industry-changing. Written by one person, programming part-time. That is a staggering achievement. The power of using the right language for your project goes far further than most people dream. Our imagination about this is crippled by path dependence, social proof, and the conditioning that comes from only ever doing things the same few ways, like those fish in experiments (which may be urban legends?) who stick to their corner of the aquarium even after a glass barrier has been removed. The solution space of software and programming is so much larger than most of us want to imagine that it is. Sad.
I'm not saying that everyone should use Arc—language/programmer fit is a key part of language/project fit. But when all three variables align, incredible things become possible. Not only HN, but YC would not exist without Arc. Another case that came up recently was Cloudflare; very different language, project, and programmer, but a similar story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883548).
I appreciate you taking the time to reply to this, but come on, “YC would not exist without Arc” is a definite exaggeration. YC’s impact as a platform is immeasurable, but the software is quite simple that could be coded in any other programming language just as well (I’d argue better since users wouldn’t be waiting now for new features to land if it weren’t for the language update).
You can write any program in any Turing-complete language, so that's not my point.
Rather, it's that there's a deep interdependency between the three variables of language, programmer, and problem that give rise to a system like HN+YC (which was a single program until 2014). If you changed any one of those variables you'd either have gotten something radically different or nothing at all. So my statement is a bit like saying that YC would not exist without PG; and your objection is a bit like saying: that's an exaggeration, any person who did the same steps at the same time could have arrived at the same place (and perhaps better since that person might have been a better manager as well).
(Not only PG built YC, of course! But PG wrote the software and that was a critical piece.)
Not all programs have this property about the language they're written in—but some do, and they tend to be particularly interesting and creative. For another example, one might say that Unix would not exist without C.
There would be more interesting systems in the world if we were more open as a community to these unexplored spaces. We exclude them in order to have the feeling that we know what we're doing, and we reinforce this by ridiculing and dismissing deviants. The social dynamics that exclude new possibilities are strong, which is one reason why when systems like this do end up succeeding, they tend to be the work of loners, weirdos, or people who have some strange mutation to withstand social pressure. (This by the way is the origin of the "$weird-language is only good for solo programmers" meme, ironically confusing cause and effect.) No doubt other fields work the same way; software is just the one I know well enough for the mechanisms to be obvious to me.
The relationship between a program and the language it's written in is like the relationship between a piece of music and the instrument it was composed for. To say "this system could have been built in some other language" is like saying "this music could have been composed for some other instrument". That may technically be true; music gets transcribed for other instruments all the time, just as programs get ported to other languages. But it misses the important thing: the process by which the music or program got written in the first place.
There are intimate feedback loops between the mind of the composer, the developing music, and the instrument—which possibilities it makes natural/easy vs. which it discourages/excludes. Every instrument and every programming language has a different set of these. They may not differ in what can theoretically be played on them, but they differ immensely in how they organize the space of possibilities—which ones are near at hand vs. out of reach. You can play the same scales on the piano, the cello, and the guitar, but where the mind goes next as it composes a new sequence of notes—not a scale, but a sequence that has never existed before—is deeply conditioned by the instrument it's related to, which is the medium it's growing in. Some next-notes are more likely than others, and which next-notes those are differs between instruments. In the same way, a program grows by accruing constructs (expressions, statements, forms, types), and the ones that are most likely to get added next are the ones that are most natural and nearest-to-mind, given the program so far. Which next-constructs those are differs greatly between languages.
Since each next-note or next-construct is conditioned by the sequence it's adding to, this effect compounds as the system grows. It follows that, at least for the most interesting and creative systems, a program is literally unthinkable apart from the language it grows in. So much for "languages don't matter"—yet how often that untrue truism is repeated! The reason for this fallacy is that we take a program as if it existed prior to being written, which is impossible.
Seems to me, he's an insider who is in the know and he's made an effort to explain why he sees it that way:
As long as we're on the topic, consider this: the software for both HN and YC was just a single Arc program (and not a large one) for the first 9 years of their existence, during which they went from nothing to massively successful to industry-changing.
I mean, you don't have to agree, but his opinion is probably more informed on the topic than yours is.
I'm trying to write this in a way that does not come across as sarcastic or ungracious, but does it strike anyone else as odd that this change blocks on the next version of the underlying programming language?
Given that both the language and the forum are developed in tandem, and are linked to the degree that they ship together, it wouldn't be surprising that changes in Arc would be made specifically with the forum in mind.
The language, yes[0], but AFAIK the maintainers don't take pull requests.
Arc has a public fork called Anarki[1], which is built on Racket[2]. The Anarki version of the forum differs from the Arc forum, which differs from HN's own custom instance, which is closed because of various YCombinator business reasons.
And to be a little more specific (because I really like Arc), the releases are very rare, and minor at this point. I would be surprised if the Arc that was running HN was the latest released version of Arc, the news library notwithstanding.
Your many posts and emails about this are beginning to resemble harassment. We've given you many lengthy explanations and I've deleted dozens of posts at your request. I've spent hours engaging with you about this, answering questions and objections and explaining HN's approach in deep detail.
As I've explained many times in these conversations, we're happy to delete specific posts and to redact identifying information. What we don't allow is wholesale deletion of account history. You disagree with that—you've said so dozens of times—and this has now become repetitive and your behavior has become abusive. Actually, it became abusive months ago, including with surprisingly vicious comments in email. We try give people the benefit of the doubt and cut them slack for as long as we can, but I don't see what else to do at this point but ban your account and ask you to stop.
Question - is this at the top because you've pinned it there, or because people voted it so? I've been around here for 6-ish years now, and don't think I've seen any pinned mod comments before.
I pinned it. I usually do that for more boring reasons, like linking to a previous submission when an item is a dupe. But sometimes there are admonitions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158853 from a couple days ago, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22827249 from a month ago, that try to steer a thread in a more guidelinesy direction. That works. But I try to do it sparingly.
I follow Dang's comments because I find it interesting how he moderates the site. I have definitely seen comments like this one which always appear at the top of threads, so I'm quite sure they're pinned.
This is absolutely pinned. I prefer to imagine that since we haven't noticed such comments on the regular means this power is not habitually abused to float a particular opinion/angle to the top of threads. That policy is not guaranteed to be enforced, so I'd prefer a visible indication (eg. via an icon, akin to Reddit) indicating the comment has been pinned. Transparency for the win.
Of course, a truly Evil™ company would have both options available: a visible icon for transparently pinned comments, but also the ability to invisibly pin a comment to influence readers. There is no real foolproof method, unfortunately.
I don't know if pinning is even necessarily a chief tactic as I presume they're also able to arbitrarily modify a comment's votes, or at least to overlook manipulation of votes from an entity they've given agency to.
The problem with "by top score" is it would itself influence the scoring, even if only some people used it. The oldest comments would stay at the top of such a list, because they get seen more and thus have more opportunities for upvotes, creating a self-sustaining cycle. You always need a time counterweight.
That would be nice. And also a way to wrap all comments that are replies to first-level comments so that we can see all these and only reaf discussions on projects that interest us.
Sorry, it may not be the right word. I mean the effect that clicking on the little "[-]" does. A way to automatically clic this for all second-level comments, so that only first-level comments that directly answer the "Ask HN" appear.
If you find a place for comments sorting options (what my parent comment initially suggested), it could go there too (it's also related to comments display settings).
Maybe a line between the "add comment" button and the first displayed comment?
I struggled with whether this point is closest to pagination or sorting/ordering and ultimately chose here.
Is there any chance to get client-side thread collapsing?
Use case: suppose I'm interested in reading about side projects and not pagination or I'm "done" reading about side project X and want to get on to side project Y. If I could click to collapse the entire pagination thread (client-side only) and then later collapse project X's thread, that would represent an improvement in experience on this thread. (It's less clear that this applies generally to topics with 50 comments, but over 250, it could help.)
That's a great idea. I don't even think it's on our list. I'll add it.
We have an experimental feature to highlight new comments if you or anyone wants to give it a try - email hn@ycombinator.com. But you'll still have to scroll through the pages to find the new ones.
Consider whether we might be better off without that feature, which also makes it super easy to keep aging threads alive, which is something HN has subtly discouraged thus far.
I've definitely been considering it, but it's also the most-requested feature by the people who've been using the highlighting so far. I think as long as we make it relatively passive, i.e. you still have to scroll to see the new things, it might not be too much of an unwanted catalyst.
Worst case, if it did turn out to have a major negative effect, I hope (I pray?) we would have enough killer instinct to claw it back.
Hi dang,
Honestly I don't know how to say this other than I am so thankful that you take your job so seriously.
I can honestly say that I've never seen you act on HN other than in a positive way, and reading your contributions is part of the delight of visiting this site =)...
Sorry, it's just I can think of so few other sites where my first thought on seeing a mod post is not, "Oh what happened now..." and I just wanted to thank you for all the effort that you put in.
Hey Dang, another side project born right from this post. I've listed all possible links from this post across pages and listed down here. https://born-out-of-covid.f22labs.com/
Let me know your thoughts, will add more details and links after i wake up tomorrow.
Nice! That could form the basis for a future thread. (One observation in case it's helpful: I'm seeing lots of duplicates on that page.)
Edit: while I have you: you've posted several links to that already, plus you posted 10 of these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23189273. That's not allowed on HN—users consider it spamming—so please don't. It's of course ok to link occasionally to your own work when it's relevant, but not to use HN threads aggressively for promotion. The idea is always conversation, and one can't have a conversation with a commercial.
Hopefully, this will reduce the use of virgin plastic for creating art pieces in 3d printing community and you might be able to create beautiful and useful things out of waste plastic while cleaning plastic waste from the environment.
It's a profitable business.
I worked on this in my free time during quarantine.
I want to make the project more accessible so people around the world can develop local recycling unit. There is lots of work which needs to be done including making parts more standardized, demonstrating how parts fight together in a visual way and also have a microcontroller firmware to control diameter of filament. I don't have much experience with microcontrollers but I've ideas, so we'll see.
Some guys in our city are doing this on a larger scale, schools in the area collect all plastic bottles and in return they get 3d filament: https://www.greenbatch.com/
Wow that's great, I wonder how they modify the PET polymer, as I've been researching it's not an easy polymer to print with atleast not without the glycol modification which is usually sold as PETG.
I’ve been looking into Precious Plastic project. They have a lot of open source parts to recycling plastic. I couldn’t find any proof it was actually cost effective? How did you come to compute it’s profitable?
This is a really cool idea. I originally hoped it was about recycling your own plastic waste into filament for your own home printing, but I guess that's a bit too much to expect.
It's made up of 38CrMoAlA and treated with nitriding gas treatment to improve wear resistance and hardness. And it includes free shipping from china, it's probably 5-10kg. And includes machined nozzle too.
Wood drill has continuous flight depth while extrusion screw has 3 zones. In compression zone, flight depth is gradually reduced to compress polymer.
Other than this, I think you'll have problem with finding reasonably straight wood auger drill.
With precision machine barrel and screw, screw will not touch barrel wall.
You can experiment with wood drill and steel tube but I doubt you'll get consistent diameter filament with it.
If you fancy making cheaper one for small scale/personal use, try this one:
I live in a condo with a concierge service, and I need to order passes for delivery guys with a phone call. Naturally, this got very boring very quickly, so I made a Chrome extension which upon a click connects to a Voximplant app which calls the concierge, receives his voice input, forwards it to Dialogflow, and uses the intent recognized by DF to play back recorded audio tracks of my voice asking for a pass, answering questions or thanking the concierge.
I'm thinking about making the extension intercept the traffic to the website of my favorite delivery services and automatically place the call so the button click also won't be required.
This is my view of the AI dystopia. AI for calling concierge, AI for answering concierge, AI for monitoring the concierge calls, AI for all the pointless things that humans used to do, but expanded and accelerated massively. Humans spending their lives training AI to defeat some new attack or spam bot.
The "AI" part here is a bug, not a feature. I wouldn't have to do it if I had an API for sending requests, or a condo-provided app, or at least if the concierge service used e.g. Telegram officially. Since neither of these is true, I had to resort to a workaround.
Incredible. By the end of the quarantine you'll be able to work as usual up until the point where you casually open the door to catch the concierge with your meal anticipating the fact that he doesn't need to ring the doorbell anymore.
I built a half-pipe with my 10-year-old son! We designed it in Sketchup, did a material takeoff in Excel, and built it with lumber that got delivered to our house. 4’ high, 8’ wide and 29’ long—-and hours and hours of fun. Teaching things like trig and how to use a chop saw and the difference between different grades of plywood to a boy who’s learning-starved since school closed has been one of the more rewarding things I’ve ever done.
Excellent project. Not as hard as a half pipe, when I was 8 my Dad and I built a lumber bike rack. Classic memory, its still stationed in front of the garage having taken quiet a beating. During the summer every night of mine and my siblings - sometimes drunken - teenage buffoonery for years on end ended with us riding/crashing into each slot.
I created https://web.trango.io a LAN based calling and file sharing service. Essentially, you can share files, make video and audio calls to those on the same network as you without having to go through the internet. Your data never leaves your local Wifi. The internet is only used to discover those on the same network as you. We use webrtc and a signalling server to make this system work.
We were in the same office and needed a fast, simple way to communicate with eachother without coming in close contact (covid 19) and wanted to do that over LAN rather than use tools over the internet NOR use our ancient intercom system. So now we are using this internally for fast file sharing and good quality video calls.
Going to be introducing group calls soon and also the ability to integrate online calling and file sharing.
This is a really great idea from the security and privacy point for small teams and offices. And for sharing stuff in a house! Would this work through a VPN?
you could also introduce differnt channels, so different groups of ppl can chat . And you should add text chat through the data channel
It works over some VPN's but not all. We will look into why and try to resolve.
Yes, it works very well when we need to call eachother or share files with eachother in the office. At home, I mainly use it to share large pictures and videos with my wife as it is very fast.
Yes, different channels and group calling should be added. We could add a chat function in it aswell.
Even though it is based on your local wifi and the data never leaves your home/office network, we have still encrypted it by default so we can integrate online calling and file sharing in a secure manner and dont have to redo the whole security aspect again!
Sure. We used webrtc, websockets and a signalling server which helps in discovering who is available on your local network. However, none of the calls or files ever go through the server.
We want to refine it a bit further before taking it opensource. :)
There is no range. Whoever is connected to the same Wifi network can communicate or share files. You could say the range is only as good as the signals from your router.
I've recently written a Python app that selects a random location in an area defined by a user-supplied shapefile [1], grabs corresponding aerial imagery from Google Maps, and posts it as a geotagged tweet:
I've built this tool because satellite imagery can be extremely beautiful [2], and I was looking for a way of regularly receiving high-resolution satellite views of arbitrary locations such as the center pivot irrigation farms of the American heartland [3] in my timeline. Plus, for obvious reasons, it's nice to see the world without actually having to go outside right now.
Currently, I'm running two Twitter bots based on ærialbot:
I think you can make the images a lot more appealing by adding some automated post-processing to them.
I don't know a lot about image processing algorithms but clicking "Auto" on google photos tweaks basic stuff like exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, vibrance etc. so the image has a lot more "punch".
Good comment – ærialbot actually does increase contrast and saturation a tiny bit, but I've kept this very conservative for a couple of reasons:
* Some areas of the world are just naturally fairly flat and monochromatic, so a dynamic contrast/saturation/brightness adjustment (e.g. one that would turn the darkest pixel black, the brightest pixel white and linearly map the rest between these extremes) would not work for these areas.
* The available satellite imagery has been captured and processed in a variety of ways depending on the region, so a constant contrast/saturation/brightness adjustment might work well in some places, but overcorrect things in other places (especially urban areas in the US and Europe tend to already be fairly saturated and contrasty).
Basically, doing this well would involve a whole bunch of testing and fine-tuning. And since not even Google (the source of the imagery) seems to do this, I decided not to bother: Keeping the data basically the way I receive it is easy and "honest".
I finally put my photos up on my personal website. The only constraint I gave myself was to build a site that doesn’t need Javascript to load.
In the end I ended up using Next.js as a static site generator that pulls all the routes from my directory structure, making it possible to add new photography collections and filters as I go.
Might be overkill for the use case but it was fun to learn. The irony is I had to write a bunch of JS to produce it.
Still need to optimize the image sizes and I am thinking about adding filters for b&w/color/format.
Looks great! I did something similar with hugo and tried to automate the process as much as possible.
I use a utility called jhead to resize, fix rotation issues, and rename photos by date - then I tied this to a folder action on macos so I can just drop photos in a folder and they get renamed and resized.
Then Hugo has this cool 'smart' cropping feature which tries to crop based on content [1] - and the end result is now all I do is drop photos in a folder and publish and it comes out looking pretty good [2].
Nice! I found Hugo about halfway through working on this and it seemed like a great solution as well. The jhead utility would save me a ton of time as I ended up cross referencing my negatives to find processing dates which is all in the metadata.
I ended up using sharp [1] since it was so easy to integrate into my workflow.
Cool project! I set out to do something similar as well, but with a slight different scope. I wanted a web gallery that I can use to access all my (substantial) collection of pictures, that does not need any maintenance/work to get started. It lists directories and generates thumbnails on the fly, no database needed.
No JS would have been nice, but ended up making the content draw and re-flow in JS as I wanted to keep the aspect ratio of the thumbnails instead of showing a bunch of squares, for which a simple flexbox would have been enough.
OP, have you tried loading="lazy" ? I don't know if it works with the picture tag but it is worth trying I think.
Very often, webpages contain many images that contribute to data-usage and how fast a page can load. Most of those images are off-screen (non-critical), requiring user interaction (an example being scroll) in order to view them.
Loading attribute
The loading attribute on an <img> element (or the loading attribute on an <iframe>) can be used to instruct the browser to defer loading of images/iframes that are off-screen until the user scrolls near them.
The HTML <picture> element contains zero or more <source> elements and one <img> element to offer alternative versions of an image for different display/device scenarios.
The browser will consider each child <source> element and choose the best match among them. If no matches are found—or the browser doesn't support the <picture> element—the URL of the <img> element's src attribute is selected. The selected image is then presented in the space occupied by the <img> element.
To decide which URL to load, the user agent examines each <source>'s srcset, media, and type attributes to select a compatible image that best matches the current layout and capabilities of the display device.
The <img> element serves two purposes:
It describes the size and other attributes of the image and its presentation.
It provides a fallback in case none of the offered <source> elements are able to provide a usable image.
Common use cases for <picture>:
Art direction. Cropping or modifying images for different media conditions (for example, loading a simpler version of an image which has too many details, on smaller displays).
Offering alternative image formats, for cases where certain formats are not supported.
Saving bandwidth and speeding page load times by loading the most appropriate image for the viewer's display.
If providing higher-density versions of an image for high-DPI (Retina) display, use srcset on the <img> element instead. This lets browsers opt for lower-density versions in data-saving modes, and you don't have to write explicit media conditions.
Good point I hadn't thought of that. Still have to troubleshoot it a bit in Firefox but it looks like its working in Chrome.
The resolution scaling is a good idea as well. I used the picture tag initially as a fallback for browsers that don't support webp images. More importantly I need to actually create scaled images which I have been putting off...
You might want to add some copyright notice. Even if you don't want to monetize them is better for others to ask your permission rather then lose them to hoarders and later watch them making money and you get null.
I've tried to make it intuitive enough that you don't have to read a page of instructions first but let me know if I've missed the mark. I'm hoping you can learn the gameplay mechanics as you play.
I'm not using any web frameworks for this which was actually fun to do. It gave me a chance to improve my understanding of CSS animations + reflows, and catch up with changes to JavaScript.
Just played with it for a few minutes, I liked it! The only bit that occasionally tripped me up was going diagonally in my word construction, but I got the hang of it after a few rounds.
One thing that may make this easier is beveling the edges of the tiles slightly so you don't accidentally select letters on either side of the diagonal unintentionally.
> One thing that may make this easier is beveling the edges of the tiles slightly so you don't accidentally select letters on either side of the diagonal unintentionally.
Thanks, I'll have a play with that. If you use your web devtools to inspect the HTML, you should see over each letter tile, there's actually an invisible tile on top of each one at a 45 degree angle that's being used as the real touch/mouse target for selecting letters (as accidental selection is awful if you use the actual tile as the target). Maybe there's a more reliable way but playing with the target shapes and sizes will probably help.
Loved it! A few things that confused me:
1. "?" is a wild card, right? (meaning it can stand in for any letter)
2. I once got a diphthong "qu" in a single tile - not sure if it was a glitch?
3. Why is a tile sometimes yellow?
Great feedback, thanks! Sounds like I need to make the game rules clearer but hoping I can do that without explicit instructions somehow (it's a fun design challenge too). Let me know if you've got any ideas.
> 1. "?" is a wild card, right? (meaning it can stand in for any letter)
Yep! It'll autocomplete to a valid letter as you use it - there should be tons of valid 3 letter words so I was hoping people would figure it out with a quick bit of experimenting. Try just making up a long word to see if you can find one for big points (at the cost of the time it takes you to guess).
> 2. I once got a diphthong "qu" in a single tile - not sure if it was a glitch?
Yep, there's no "q" tile, only a "qu" tile to make it easier to spell something. Adding diphthong to my personal dictionary!
> 3. Why is a tile sometimes yellow?
Scoring explanation:
- Word scores directly depend on the length the word and goes up quick e.g. for a 3 letter word you get only 1 point (a deliberately lame amount), then 4 points for 4 letters, 9 points for 5 letters, 16 points for 6 letters, 25 points for 7 letters.
- The exception is yellow/bonus tiles are counted like they were two letters when calculating the word score, so one or more bonus tiles in a word grows the word score massively e.g. a 5 letter word using 2 bonus tiles will get you 25 points instead of the usual 9.
- You get rewarded a bonus tile if you spell a long word (this one for sure isn't obvious unless you play several games).
One of the core strategies is to earn a few bonus tiles with longer words, then make maximum use of them to level up by spelling words using multiple bonus tiles at once.
For the scoring, I was hoping for players to go through this thought process 1) "hmm, 3 letters words only give you a single point" 2) "4 and 5 letter words get way more points, and the score goes up rapidly by the length of the word" 3) "the bonus/yellow tiles boost the score up even faster". Sounds like this needs more work though so thanks.
Nice, fun. I think a 5x5 grid would be better, at least for me. I can't hold a 6x6 in my head. Or maybe that's inevitable with the constant cycling of letters.
And maybe I wanted vowels and consonants to look different (maybe a subtle-ish color change) so I could see at a quick glance how I'm doing at board management. But who knows if this would be useful in practice. (Actually now I wonder if I can do this myself in CSS...)
Thanks, that's useful feedback! I agree some colour variations would be good for guiding the eye.
I partly moved from 5x5 originally to 5x6 because it looked better on mobile/portrait but then I found in play testing more letters gave people more room to manoeuvre when the orange/bonus tiles start appearing (where you want to delay using them).
Really fun, very polished! Stream of consciousness feedback:
After a few levels I found clusters of letters I was having trouble with building up over time (there was an “X” right in the middle, and like six “I”s clumped up). I found myself wishing there was some mechanic that could clear them out. Maybe that would make it too easy though.
I really love the animation when you make it to the next level, very satisfying.
On mobile safari, holding your finger on a tile for too long causes a text selection.
Thanks, stream of consciousness feedback is ideal. :)
> After a few levels I found clusters of letters I was having trouble with building up over time (there was an “X” right in the middle, and like six “I”s clumped up). I found myself wishing there was some mechanic that could clear them out. Maybe that would make it too easy though.
Yep, this seems worthwhile looking at. Maybe smarter letter randomisation would help this e.g. don't allow a new "I" tile in a place that has two "I" tiles already, don't allow clusters of consonants.
> I really love the animation when you make it to the next level, very satisfying.
Great! I thought I needed something flashier so I'm happy this could be enough.
> On mobile safari, holding your finger on a tile for too long causes a text selection.
Ah, thought I caught that. Thanks!
> I’d love a “zen mode” with no timer!
Yep, I want to figure something out for this. It's pretty fun thinking of different scoring mechanics and how this impacts gameplay strategy.
This was great! Loved it and the time per level felt good as in I wasn't inordinately stressed. Got to 249 the first time but had some scares for sure.
Thanks! Glad the timing didn't feel stressful. I've had some people say they don't generally like timed games but when it was game over here they felt it was fair instead of blaming the game - seems a decent thing to aim for.
You actually get an extra second before your time runs out to increase the chance of "just in time" saves. :)
That was fun. I wanted to create a platform where you could drop in a game like yours and instantly enable leaderboards with groups of friends. I have couple of test games plugged in. Check it out.
Wow very well made, I did a similar thing (for kids) couple of years back, but I really like that you can swipe in your version! https://finding-nora.com/
Thanks, it's more work than it looks which you'll know. The swiping code was a bit of a pain to be honest. The web APIs for handling mice and touch events together aren't well unified.
Haha, we have the same confetti effect at the end. Nice work! Is the situation with iOS and PWAs any better since you last worked on it (I saw your note about a few issues on the GitHub page)?
Yes I also wanted to add swiping back then but I guess it’s even harder if you’re using React.
PWA’s are slowly becoming better on ios, there was another new release of safari that fixed a lot of bugs. But it’s still very niche, since Add to Home Screen is so hard to find for users
Okay, I can add them if you let me know of any others. I'm using the same dictionary as Letterpress (which is one of the best openly available ones I've found) with a few additions.
1) Trail Router (https://trailrouter.com) - This is a running route planner that favours greenery and nature in the routes it generates. It can generate point-to-point or round-trip routes that meet a specified distance. I developed this because I am (or was...) a frequent traveller for work, and want to run in nice areas rather than by horrible busy roads when I'm visiting somewhere new. Naturally, the utility of this tool is limited at the moment for people stuck in lockdown!
2) Fresh Brews (https://twitter.com/FreshBrews_UK) - I've been touring the UK's finest craft beer breweries from my own home in recent weeks. New beer releases sell out very quickly and I was frequently missing out. Fresh Brews is a simple bot that monitors the online shops of my favourite breweries and posts when a new beer is released to the shop, or an item comes back into stock.
Super nice work on trailrouter. The several routes it produced for me in Berlin look quite nice, being familiar with the surroundings.
Would be cool to see how you built it, if you put it on github.
I’m curios about building a similar thing for cycling – crazily neither Komoot nor Google Maps let you filter by type of road, and I’d like to select only bicycle paths and roads where cars can‘t go. Even if it means cycling much longer, I’d simply like to avoid cars and in Berlin it’s possible 90% of the time.
I'll probably write a blog post on how it's built though - there's quite a lot going on under the hood!
Supporting cycling is a possibility for the future. I don't think you'd want to absolutely exclude non-cycleways (as it might make many routes impossible), but you could certainly weight very heavily against them and show on the map which parts of the route were dedicated to cyclists vs which were not.
Congratulations on creating trailrouter! This is one of the most unique and useful side projects I’ve seen in quite a while. I had a lot of fun looking at the various suggestions it offered for my neighbourhood, and I could see how this could help people enjoy their neighborhood a lot more.
If you have the time, I’d also love to read a blog post (or even series) explaining how you built this. Your answer on the Graphhopper forum was very clear and makes me think that a more detailed version could be super useful for a lot of people.
Thanks very much for the kind words! I wasn't sure if others would find the technical details of this topic interesting (it's my first foray into GIS work), but it sounds like they would, so consider a blog post in the works.
Thanks for the link, that’s a very interesting read.
Subscribed to you on twitter to get updated if you publish a post on that!
The thing on absolutely excluding – yes, maybe some things are impossible, but in my planning, it’s really about the journey, so even if I have to go additional hundreds of kilometers, so even in terms of extra days, but via cycling ways and tiny country-side streets (without max speeds over 30km ideally or similar) and not see fast moving cars almost at all, which in Berlin/Brandenburg area, for example, seems to really be possible if you plan it manually. Judging by the success of applying your rules on the trails it surely can be done better than I have seen so far.
Thanks, I didn”t know about this one, the tiles they have are really nice. But still no control over avoiding larger roads or what to prefer as a fallback. I still get some larger roads selected, but it’s definitely an improvement over google maps.
I also made the mistake of trying Google Maps for bicycle routes early last year. Searching for a better alternative, I found komoot.com; perhaps you might want to try it.
For my region, I'm pretty happy with it (although it has its issues in places where you have to pass along bigger roads for short distances). It's OSM-based, though, so that might vary.
Trail Router is amazing! I just had it suggest a 5k route to me and it suggested my favourite 5k route immediately. Currently, it doesn't seem to care about elevation, that might be something to look at if you are running out of feature ideas. Is is open source?
I'd actually also be willing to donate a little for the development of such a cool tool.
Thanks! There is an option in the settings menu to "Avoid hills", and in the not-too-distant future that will become a slider that allows you to prefer hills or avoid them.
It's not open source yet, but I might open it up in the future. There's a donate link hidden away in the About page. Any donation would be much appreciated, and would help with the server costs (it needs a huge amount of RAM to store the whole planet's data).
I just had the exact same experience! It nailed the “close to home” routes I do perfectly. Will definitely use this when I want to change it up and run somewhere else in the city.
Trail Router is great! Tested it out for a few cities I know like Stockholm, Gothenburg, Las Palmas and Hanoi and it's really good.
The only thing I noticed is that it seems to prefer going next to water over anything else and have a slight tendency to take detours to run next to very small city parks. Running past a small city park for 50 meters might not be worth the detour.
I tried out Trail Router and found a trail hidden in the woods within 3 miles of my house that I never knew about in the several years I have lived here. Can't wait to check it out. Nice tool!
Just wanted to drop by saying that trailrouter looks great. One small suggestion. I'd add an option to avoid cemeteries as (at least in some cultures) running through one could be considered ill-mannered.
1. Would it be possible to add an undo button for when changing a route goes wrong?
2. I think this would also work really well for planning routes and/or measuring their precise length. In fact, I have been looking for such a tool for ages! One like yours which also allows taking small tracks and paths and not just roads! Unfortunately, currently it's still somewhat difficult to select the precise route as changing it in some place might suddenly change it almost entirely. (Again, an undo button would be nice.) I assume this happens because Trail Router still tries to minimize a certain loss function? Would it be possible to disable that entirely, so that one could "free-draw" routes?
[UPDATE]: Just noticed that one can actually disable all routing preferences. This seems to be doing the trick – very nice!
More love for TrailRouter here. Especially love that you can export a GPX for a watch. I get stuck running the same unimaginative routes so even the ability to be able to have it plan a round trip from my house is amazing. Even more so that it finds out green space. Thanks for this!
Trail Router is incredibly well done. I've had the exact problem that you're describing. I'm currently training for my first 100 miler and I'm getting bored of my regular routes (which hurts motivation) so I'm really excited to try it out.
Trail router looks great. I put my location in and the first three routes were already regular routes of mine , and the next one was one I'll probably have to incorporate. Bookmarking it for when I travel next.
Trail Router is great for my use-case during lockdown. I've been trying to walk different ~3mi round-trip routes during quarantine so as to not get bored and this is very helpful to give me more ideas. Thanks!
TR worked pretty well. Since coming home from e. Europe two months ago, I’ve been exploring the nearby trails on an almost daily basis. Your website suggested the exact 6 mi hiking route that I enjoyed yesterday! When i cycled through the options for other 6 mile options it became less imaginative and more urban street centric. Still, a good interface and helpful as a reference tool. Thanks!
Trail Router looks fantastic! In light of the shutdowns, I've restarted my running / training and I'm planning for a 10 miler in October. This will be a fun way to plan runs and keep me interested. That's always been my big issue - I get bored easily if I see the same thing over and over.
On trailrouter how do you determine safety levels of roads? I had on one of my generated routes a 45mph road and then a few other times it had me cross I-95 (an 8 lane highway here). Overall very neat though. I'd been using mile meter to draw out manually my routes.
There is a setting in Trail Router to "Avoid Potentially Unsafe Roads" which makes it much more conservative about road choices.
It uses OSM data for routing information, but this is quite poor for pedestrian safety (particularly in the US it seems, where some 'secondary' roads are very safe, and others are death traps). There are specific tags for foot access and sidewalks, but they are rarely used outside of cities. Crossing the I-95 should only be done if there's a bridge going over it, it should never take you across the lanes of traffic (!). If it does, please do email me a link to the route if you don't mind.
Hi! I love the Trail Router. How did you get the data to create a Strava heatmap? I see the API can download routes by ID, but I'm curious how to do it based on geographic area. Thanks :)
I'm leaving a comment here as a reminder too! I've been playing with open street map data to learn routing algorithms, I would love to compare notes : D
* Add sliders for setting greenery and hills preferences (so you can _prefer_ hills, rather than just avoid them)
* Add support for preferring particular surfaces (e.g. tarmac vs trail)
* Add support for creating distance-specific round-trip routes that pass through one or more waypoints (at the moment you can only specify a start/stop location for round-trip)
* Sometimes round-trip routing suggests some very complex routes which would be hard to follow when running. Some work could go into simplifying such cases.
* Improve the UI/UX, it's still quite fiddly, especially on mobile
More distant:
* Cycling support
* Native mobile apps (there are already mobile apps for Trail Router, but they're basically WebViews)
* Offline routing support in the mobile app?!
* Direct sync'ing of routes to watches/Strava would be nice, but there's no open APIs for this yet.
If you have any other suggestions feel free to chip in!
Me and my friend have just started something we are calling PomPals, which is pomodoro timer which basically syncs with your friends, so you can hang out during your breaks together.
It is an electron (toolbar) app, which uses WebRTC, so should be fully P2P.
It is too early to use or show, but I did not want to miss out on this thread!
I don't know much about WebRTC or electron, so forgive me if this question makes no sense: if it's a simple toolbar app (such as a Chrome extension) why is electron needed?
Hi! When I say toolbar, I mean in the native toolbar (runs outside the browser) - we decided with this approach due to the fact you may not always be in a browser (coding for example).
This is an idea I had but never executed on: Teamodoro. I like your name better! Hope you can take it to good place so I can try it with my remote co-founder : )
Well, my main side project is the same as it's been for the last couple of years, an animation/vector editing tool written in Rust: https://github.com/logicalshift/flowbetween
It's sort of starting to make the transition between a pile of ideas and an actually useful tool at the moment. The whole idea is to be a vector editing application that works more like a bitmap tool when it comes to painting, so there's a flood-fill tool and a way to build up paths just by drawing on the canvas rather than having to manually mess around with control points.
The way I built the UI is unique too I think. Choices for UI librarys for Rust were quite limited when I started so I built it to be easy to move to different libraries. I don't think there's any other UI library in existence that is as seamless for switching between platforms (or which can turn from a native app to a web app with a compiler flag without resorting to something like Electron)
I suspect that https://github.com/hecrj/iced would now be another UI library that’s as seamless for switching between platforms. Flutter might qualify too (or might not).
I’ve been keeping an eye on the various UI libraries when they come up: right now it seems to take me around a month to add a new one so I’m waiting for one to get traction.
Something else that’s a problem is that as a drawing app, FlowBetween wants to be able to get access to data from a digitizer: pen pressure and tilt in particular. A lot of UI libraries don’t think to pass that through from the operating system, or have an awkward API (browser support is also very spotty for this)
Yeah, lack of support for different input media has been a real pain point for me—most of the developers of these things have mice only, and don’t stop to bother about touch or pen input. I use a Surface Book which has mouse, touch and pen, and I like to use all three forms at various times.
If you’re trying to do touch and pen on non-web platforms, things tend to be very messy if you want to handle all three types of pointers optimally.
But browser support spotty? I find the pointers events API a marvellous abstraction over platform differences, doing the right thing automatically for >99% of cases, and making the remaining cases possible. The only thing I feel it actually lacks is standardised gesture support for touch. I wrote a simple pressure-capable drawing app a couple of years back in the very early days of pressure-sensitivity (back when Edge was the only browser on Windows that supported it, so I targeted Edge only until other browsers got it), and I found it a refreshingly straightforward system to work with. And since then, everyone implements things like tilt and pressure.
So I’m curious to hear what you’re quibbling over, as someone that’s been using this stuff in anger more recently than I.
I suspect some of my experience is now out of date, as it's now spread out over quite some time. The most recent issue I had to deal with was Chrome: when drawing the canvas at high-res it was being a bit slow at blitting some bitmaps and so was running at 30fps. Something is tied to the framerate with the pointer events implementation and so the events also lagged behind, which made drawing on the canvas quite difficult as the display was 250-500ms behind the user. Eventually 'fixed' by turning the resolution down, but it was a real pain finding what part of the application had got behind (FlowBetween being designed not to lag but to catch up when the display can't keep up). That's quite a subtle one and the pointer events lagging is easily mistaken for the frame rate lagging.
Other browsers don't do this, but they've had a few other issues: what I remember in particular - some only support pressure information using the touch API, and some seemed to support pressure information on different APIs on different platforms, so both pointer events and touch events were needed.
All of these are maturity issues rather than real problems with the API, though and I haven't re-checked some of the older issues recently - that Chrome issue was still happening back in January so might still be around, but the others I last encountered over a year ago so may have been fixed by now.
If you haven’t been using it, make sure to use PointerEvent.getCoalescedEvents where available, which unlinks the events from the display frame rate. Anything using pointer events for drawing should use it. (But remember that events can come in at any speed, e.g. a 240fps pen should coalesce four events per 60fps frame—so make sure you can cope with lots of events.)
I believe that the pointer events API is in current browsers now uniformly superior in functionality to the touch events API which it obsoletes.
I like to draw, and I suppose my frustrations with other animation packages that I’ve tried were the main inspiration. It’s quite nice to have something that combines two hobbies into one.
When I started I picked Rust because I’d been learning it and wanted to try using it on a more substantial project. I’m very happy with it as a choice of language: it definitely has a difficult learning curve especially with the way borrowing looks similar to references in a garbage-collected languages but works very differently. However, it’s a very expressive language: something about it makes it very easy to write code quickly that’s still very easy to follow later on.
Awesome. I dabbled with Rust several years ago, but have been thinking about diving back into it... Do you have any recommendations about where to start?
The official Rust Programming Language book is excellent and was all I really needed to learn the language. I had a small project to work on that I didn't mind rewriting after my first attempt (my build server is a NUC and I wanted to write some software flash the LEDs on the front to indicate build state)
I suspect everyone goes through a phase of hating borrowing when learning Rust: it's helpful to know that it's something that eventually 'clicks' and really stops being an issue. It didn't exist when I was learning, but 'Learning Rust with Entirely Too Many Linked Lists' looks like it would have helped a lot.
I've spent a decent amount of time learning over the time that this quarantine has been going on.
A major issue that I've seen is that of most beginner-focused educational content not being fast enough to learn with for the more experienced developer. This along with the fact that time is often a big issue for us. I've had numerous times where I had to learn a new framework within a 1-2 week time span in order to plug some work gap or speed up a project, and found no legitimate resources that could allow an intermediate developer like me to learn faster.
This is why I am currently creating content targeted specifically at intermediate to advanced developers and teaching new languages and frameworks (using the 'constructivist' method) in a way that makes the process of learning them much more efficient. In short, faster.
It's a little rough around the edges but you can check out the blog where I share my current tutorials here: https://fromtoschool.com.
Frustrated by filter bubbles and the general state of online debate, especially on Twitter, I made Debubble.
It’s a publishing tool that will let you challenge another Twitter user to a debate. If they accept, the two of you will be able to engage in a public but distraction-free conversation. Debubble will make sure you wait for your turn before you can deliver your arguments. It will also limit each response to 1500 characters (roughly one page) and the entire debate to 12 turns. Instead of cheering for their side like sports fans, registered readers will be able to signal the value they got from your conversation by starring the whole debate.
I haven’t properly tried to launch it yet, as my day job and kids are keeping me very busy at the moment.
I really like your 'starring whole debate' mechanism, that seems like huge innovation.
The trend is to just reuse the standard up/down voting comments without realizing implications. Yes, if you do this and sort comments by votes you will on average get higher quality user-curated content. OTOH small piece of UI is using reward system to condition users to seek attention, and it sets the tone for whole discussion.
There are no easy solutions here. Everyone wants their opinion to be heard (even if somebody already expressed same thing). That will sometimes mean aligning your opinion to masses so that your content gets proper visibility, which leads to echo chambers and bubbles. Your take forces users to bring attention to all of debate and not just to one side's arguments. Clever.
Thank you for the positive feedback. That's pretty much where I'm coming from: "likes" have created an unhealthy dynamic in online conversations and I was wondering if there could be a hack around that.
I find the idea very interesting. But what if people leaning on one side of the argument stars a debate because the outcome ended up favoring their side?
HN will probably find this interesting, so when you launch it, please post it as a Show HN. You can email hn@ycombinator.com for some tips about how to present it if you want (same goes for anyone—just realize that we can't always reply quickly).
I have been working on something very similar but with less of a focus on debating (https://taaalk.co). (Indefinite chats, any number of participants.)
Some friends and I started it a few years ago stopped working on it, so I decided to rebuild it over the last few months. Some of the old Taaalks are still on there:
Moving the voting mechanism 'up' the hierarchy makes it more vague. People aren't going to bother reading individual comments to find the value, they'll just skim and get a gist of who won. These debates are built on conflict, and having a blow-by-blow (individual comment) voting system will always be more engaging and fun.
Cutting out the plebs makes it less rewarding to read the debate. Celebrity debaters will be required to overcome the lack of organic pull into the conversation. Why not just watch an interview between the two people?
What you are (correctly) describing is the status quo. But that is precisely what motivated me to try something different, even if it does end up utopian.
I'm not saying it will be a utopia, I'm saying it will kill the status quo. Which you will likely succeed at because the fire & flames that made the status quo popular is receding under the label of toxic and (soon to be) rude. You are in effect chasing the value of debates up into the smoke.
The app lets users send tweets or DMs and I didn’t find an obvious way to narrow the required permissions down to just that. But a few people have now pointed this issue out and I think I will just remove that functionality and require only read permissions.
Thanks for the tip. If I end up keeping that feature, that seems to be a smart way to go about it. Due to time constraints, I was trying to keep it simple. Perhaps too simple.
This is super neat! Looking forward to seeing it in use.
I noticed during the signup flow where the user enters their email and accepts the terms, it won't actually open the terms – the confirmation screen hijacks it. Cheers!
I really like the idea, but it's a shame I can't see some other people's debates without signing in - or are they 'stored'/posted actually on Twitter, it sounds like it isn't, by the 1500ch limit?
Thank you for this feedback. To be honest, there aren't any noteworthy debates at the moment. One recent tweet and this comment on HN are literally the only promotion the app has had, so the first users have just started signing up. If and when debates appear, I will definitely think of a way to make them more accessible.
It's a cool idea, but you should ask a lot less permissions. No way am I giving you permission to make changes to my account, like follow/unfollow people for me.
I really like the part about marking the entire conversation. Very innovative and simple enough to catch on. Where can I follow your developments? Thanks!
I've registered this Twitter account: https://twitter.com/DebubbleMe. There is nothing on it for now, but if Debubble takes off in any shape or form, that's where I'll be posting the updates.
This is an interesting approach, but I suspect it won't work as intended.
After reading "How to Have Impossible Conversations" (which was recommended by someone on HN a few weeks back), I've come to understand that the toxicity of social media has more to do with the lack of social cues, rapport building, and consequences than the details of the platform.
Thank you for the honest feedback. I don't disagree. I see social media as a complex system that is based on a few simple rules that have allowed it to evolve quickly, but not necessarily the way we would like.
Since ancient times, two philosophers would often have a debate by exchanging letters. The goal was not publicity, though many of such correspondences eventually became public. The goal, as I see it, was simply searching for truth. I wonder if it's possible to build a platform for something similar today. Even if it never becomes as popular as social media, I hope it could at least create a clear distinction between entertainment and actual conversation.
Thanks! Debates are public and accessible to anyone with a link. Since the app hasn't really had any promotion until now, the first users are just signing up and there aren't really any noteworthy debates yet. If and when more debates are started, I'll find a way to make them discoverable.
I've been working on converting a Mazda RX-8 to electric. At the moment, that mostly amounts to making battery boxes to go in the various empty spaces by tig welding aluminum (which I had no experience with prior to this project).
The general plan is to use about 400 pounds of lithium iron phosphate cells, spread between the spaces under the right and left rear passenger seats where the gas tank used to be and the engine compartment (mostly approximately where the radiator was). I'm using a Netgain Hyper9 AC motor (144 volt version). I haven't decided what I'll do for charging and battery management. I plan to order an adapter from CanEV to interface to the transmission so I'll be able to keep the stickshift.
I came to this thread wondering if there would be many offline projects. Yours sounds great!
Mine was much simpler. I bought a sewing machine because I thought now would be a good time to learn how to sew and maybe I could make masks for myself and family. I never really understood how these machines work and I have to say, they are pretty amazing (even a low tech one like I got - a Singer 4423).
I also gained a ton of respect for people who are good at sewing. It's much more difficult than I thought it would be.
Whoa! That sounds like an incredibly fun project. I am not questioning your plan, as you are almost certainly more knowledgable than myself, but is there any technical reason to actually keep the manual transmission? I thought one of the biggest advantages of electric drive vehicles was a relatively linear power/torque curve.
Most EV conversions end up keeping the manual gear box because it's simply easier to build an adapter plate for the motor transmission interface than it is to build out a whole new gearbox replacement.
From what I've seen it's fine, you can choose which gear to shift to and leave it there. Cold start from 5th gear. Can even be fun to play with the gear ratios, apparently. But it is another point of failure.
One of the things holding me off from attempting an EV conversion on my old Saab 900 sitting in my shop is that the gear box in it is notoriously brittle and would break even with the torque from the (turbo) gas engine that it shipped with.
Thanks, flat nose 84 SPG. But brake lines corroded out, so I need to run new brake lines. Which is a project I've been putting off for almost 3 years now :-)
No, but it's good to see another RX-8 build thread. (I've come across a few already, but everyone seems to approach their conversion a little differently.)
Really cool! This reminds of Andy Weir's The Martian (I highly recommend the book - there was a movie as well - especially the chapters that touch on some programming!) and the lead characters clever efforts to use what (bio)tech he has in order to survive on Mars.
I've read the Martian. It's kind of fun to think that electric vehicles could at least theoretically operate on Mars. (The batteries would have trouble at low temperatures and I definitely have the wrong tires. The motor is sealed, but not well enough for Mars, and sand would eventually get into and destroy a lot of the moving parts.)
It's also fun to modify machines to be used in ways they were never intended by the original designers. Fortunately a lot of the DIY electric car components are pretty flexible in terms of how you use them. For instance, you can get your motor controller, your battery management system, and your charger from different companies and reasonably expect them to work together because they each have a well-defined job and that's all they do.
I re-read Artemis now that I know something about welding, and was kind of disappointed it was all oxygen-acetylene, which I know next to nothing about rather than TIG, which is usually the recommended way to weld aluminum. (I'm not sure if you'd even need a shield gas like argon in a vacuum environment?) Maybe there is a good technical reason for that, but it wasn't explained in the book (nor does it really matter to the story except to the 3% of readers who care about welding trivia).
No, you wouldn't need a shield gas, and if I remember right Jazz is forced to borrow a tank of argon from her dad so as to not tip him off that she'd be welding outside, even though she wouldn't be using it.
Well, any typical electric motor could trivially be considered a "rotary".
I did save one of the rotors from the engine. Maybe I can think of some whimsical use for it, like cut a thin slice off it and weld it to something as a sort of decoration.
Come on over to The Car Lounge please!! We’re an eclectic group of enthusiasts, don’t take anything too seriously, and would love to see something like this.
Maybe a hundred miles if I'm lucky. Lithium iron phosphate isn't as good as, say, modern Tesla batteries in terms of energy density, but they're a good choice for conversions because they're much less likely to catch on fire if something goes wrong.
I could get better range with more batteries, but I also didn't want to increase the total weight of the vehicle by more than a few hundred pounds, just to stay within design tolerances.
(The RX-8 is about 3,000 pounds normally, which is pretty light for that sort of car. A Miata would probably be an even better choice, as it's around 2,000 pounds. It's hard to find newer Miatas for a reasonable price, though. RX-8's can be had pretty cheap because the rotary engine is easy to destroy if you don't maintain it properly and even in the best case usually needs to be rebuilt every 100,000 miles or so to replace worn apex seals. So, there are a lot of used RX-8's on the market that need engine work.)
Youtube mostly. I also discovered that one of the people at a local regular tech meetup teaches welding at a community college and he critiqued my welds and gave me some useful advice.
I've been using an AHP AlphaTIG 201xd, which seems to be a good machine for the price. It seems that the hard part initially is mostly just figuring out what settings to use to get a good weld. Beyond that, it's about getting used to how aluminum behaves, and figuring out how to position yourself and your work piece so you can keep your hands steady.
My welds aren't anything I would mistake for art, but they get the job done.
In many US states, there are no vehicle inspections, so as long as it has the basics like turn signals, wipers, brake lights, headlights, etc. it can be driven on the street and nobody will care.
Yea, I did not realize the huge difference moving from the east coast living in a few cities there going through the detailed inspection. I moved to the south, a different city, brought in my car, they told me to turn on my signals and hazards, asked for some money, and gave me a sticker. Very different.
I don't think there should be any regulatory problems. I'm in Oregon. I think I just have to tell them it doesn't have an engine anymore to be exempt from DEQ testing.
I used a Netgain Hyper9, which is a pretty decent AC motor. There are smaller, more powerful AC motors out there, but they can get pretty expensive. AC is nice for the regenerative braking. (When applied to electric cars, AC generally means 3-phase AC, synchronized with the rotation of the motor.)
On the other hand, series wound DC motors are cheap and popular for drag racing applications. Check out the White Zombie if you want an extreme example. The guy that built it lives nearby and he's been giving me advice on my (very different) conversion.
I was so angry at MS for taking away WunderList that I started to write a clone that looks 1:1 the same instead of using TODO. This time around the tech stack is React js as the UI with Springboot and MongoDB in the backend. Making great progress can do lists/task crud but lacking sync etc..
When you are accustomed to how things work and then forced to change its not fun. Current covid19 circumstances brought enough unwanted changes. This project started out as a fuck you to MS but it really turned into a fun project to keep my productively on track and also keep my mind busy.
The only shame is that I can't really "release" this cause it really looks like the original and the copyright vultures will waste no time coming for me. My best bet would be to change the UI design. BUT that would void the original purpose of the project.
IANAL but UI design is not copyrightable. Also let them send you a C&D and then you can get the internet to send MSFT some online hate, which would be a much more effective fuck-you than keeping your project hidden out of fear of their corporate legal team (which is just what they want, so they can maintain tacit control over non-existent IP and not have to do any work for it).
Can't you just release it as open-source for self-hosting. I think that could go under free speech and the source code will always be your invention. I wonder how is it done with myriads of software/hardware emulators and clones.
Long time user of Wunderlist here. I just migrated to Microsoft To Do, and am happy with it. All the features I cared about are still there, and it is more or less the same app. The "To-Do" space is awfully crowded...
Yep, I had the same anger. You should release it though... There are many app copies/themes 'like X' (uber/instagram/etc) that look the same. They don't get any vultures ;)
How about it making it theme-able?, with the default theme something that everyone will most likely change because it's so bad (i.e. bright neon green). One of the themes could be a WL match. If you wanted to go nuts have the themes as a separate github opensource repo (not connected to the project) which the app pulls in.
I convinced a bunch of friends to use WL a few years ago and now they're mad at ME for the acquisition! Not really mad, but despondent and looking for alternatives. I migrated to Apple's todo list app (which has +ves and -ves), but it was funny getting a bunch of texts within a week blaming me for getting them hooked on WunderList!
This is extremely niche but I'm working on a chord arpeggiator for the Korg NTS-1. [1] It's a programmable synth which has been a lot of fun to explore the theory behind designing effects and oscillators and put theory into practical use!
Holy shit this is so cool. Sadly I don't own a Minilogue but a friend does and it really is an amazing piece of hardware. I've been wanting to do something music related (except making music) for a while now but audio processing seemed like a very daunting task. So for now I made a youtube to mp3 converter because all those you find on google have a billion ads.
I've always wanted to do music stuff too, and the NTS-1 is the most approachable piece of hardware with the best software ecosystem I've found yet for doing effects and synths (I've tried Arduino / Raspberry Pi based stuff before).
The Korg SDK [1] comes with a lot of tools right out of the box (biquad filters, dual delay lines, wave types, access to parameter knobs, etc.) and their dev environment is really easy to install (you upload patches via MIDI sysex!).
The actual audio programming is wonderful - Korg's SDK gives you an pointer array of realtime values which you can manipulate how you see fit before they hit the audio out. Its simple (I made a auto pan in 10 lines of code [2]) but powerful when you apply buffers, etc.
Just wanted to tell you I love croc! Brilliant idea, much easier than trying to talk nontechnical folks through installing Python on Windows to use Magic Wormhole.
Shameful plug: If you don't need all the features of croc and just want to transfer files without installing anything, you should check out https://patchbay.pub
The minified code makes it hard to tell, but wouldn't this work on any synth if it's just using midi? Or you outputting something other than note on/off events?
For the Korg NTS-1, I am outputting something other than just note on/off events. The NTS-1 is somewhat unique that its arpeggiator computes arpeggio notes and timing onboard with three parameters: root note (the key you press), the chord pattern (major, minor, dim, sus, aug), and the arp pattern(up, down, up-down, random, etc.) and then generates the arpeggio. The root note is a simple note on, but the chord pattern and arp pattern are controlled through MIDI control change settings.
And the first question - also yes. But for synths other than the NTS-1 you'd have to send each note individually so you will more to do - e.g. keep track of note positions, determine notes in each chord, etc. I might try to do this too. As far as I know, the NTS-1 is the only one that has such a smart arpeggiator (probably because its monophonic and you can't enter chords easily...).
I guess I'll have to add an NTS-1 to my Korg family!
I've written bash scripts (using sendmidi [1]) to arpeggiate chords when I was feeling particularly lazy. It's pretty easy in midi. Figure out the root note, figure out the pattern, and just turn on/off root+pattern[i] :-).
[1] sendmidi is a great little command line tool to send midi commands to devices, or to record midi commands from devices. Its input format is plain text and you can include timing information so it's pretty easy to script music in this way: https://github.com/gbevin/SendMIDI
I run a hackerspace in Fresno, CA called Root Access. My side project is that we're making PPE and other things to help with various efforts -- face masks, face shields, scrub caps, ear savers, no-contact accessories, etc.
We're working with other local maker-y spaces on these efforts; we've picked up a few Ender 3's to help with the 3D printing and we have a small team of volunteers helping with sewing. So far we've distributed over 1,500 face masks to folks and healthcare workers in Fresno, San Diego, Idaho, and soon to a school in Uganda.
This is all on top of trying to keep our community engaged and hosting meetups and happy hours on Zoom. Also on top of my day job. I've never been so busy in my life, and I'm looking forward to a time when we can safely re-open and get back to building the community face-to-face.
I've been working on a data frame implementation for Python. I think API-wise we can do a lot better than Pandas. Especially after having seen and almost daily used dplyr with R, when having to use something else, I miss that convenience of a clear and consistent API and the chaining of operations. I don't know yet if this project makes sense in terms of speed and corner case handling. I haven't done any real-world work with it yet, but at least it's been a good learning project.
One interesting usecase for a Pandas replacement is AWS lambda functions. If you have a skinnier package that can get 80% of the data-processing niceness whilst using up a smaller % the Lambda function's size limit this could come in very handy for many people.
Nice project! Not a quarantine project, but we've been building data frame abstractions in Python for genetics [1] [2]. We spent a lot of time studying the existing abstractions (pandas, R/dplyr, pyspark, etc.) Desinging a data frame in Python is an interesting and challenging problem. Our design is far from perfect, but I think we've found an interesting design point. Here's your example in Hail:
Hail's tables are functional. Operations like `filter` and `order_by` return new tables. That means it would be an error to use `vehicles.year` in the `order_by`, since the input and the sort expression refer to different tables. Unfortunately, this means you can't use `.` chaining.
A little more background on the project: Hail's raison d'etre is a 3-dimensional generalization data frames we use for genetic data called a MatrixTable [3]. Conceptually, it is matrix-of-dicts rather than lists-of-dicts.
Genetic data is massive, so all of this is lazy and works on out of core data. The Python front end constructs an IR representing the query, it's fed through a query optimizer (written in Scala) and executed by a backend. We're working on multiple backends, but our primary backend right now is Spark.
In South Africa, we have pretty harsh lockdown laws, including only being able to exercise within 5km of your house and only between 6am and 9am.
I'm a keen mountain biker, so I've put my energy and frustration into developing new mountain bike trails in the hills around my house. Been meaning to do this for a long time, but there are such good trails a few miles further away, so the incentive has not been very strong until now.
I'm building for about 1 hour per day on average, and I manage to get between 10 and 100m of trail built in that hour, so by the time the lock-down ends I'm aiming to have a contiguous piece of singletrack that's a mile long.
Creating a new trail sounds interesting - I had to do similar as part of a service project when I was a kid, but I imagine it's much more fulfilling when it's for your personal use. How are you able to create the trail, is it free use public land, or more of a guerrilla repurposing of untended private land?
The land is in limbo: it's abandoned pine plantations currently being used by joggers, dogwalkers and (to a lesser degree) cyclists.
I can highly recommend trail building (both walking and cycling trails) as a combination of physical, aesthetic and intellectual challenges (figuring out how to use the terrain to be both fun and interesting/possible to ride and then moving tons of earth and vegetation to make it happen).
Not a side project, per se, but I've finally picked up the guitar again.
I've been a musician for going on 20 years, mainly piano but I like to collect the ability to noodle on instruments. When I was around 13 I broke my left forearm and it healed in a way that limits the rotation of my wrist quite a bit. This makes playing guitar rather difficult and at the time I started to consider branching out from piano there were a bunch of factors that made me give up on being able to play guitar. I was gigging as a piano player for 10-12 hours a week, while also going to school for piano and CS I started to develop tendonitis and trying to play guitar made it a lot worse, so I quit. I'm now in a place where I can take care of my arm (and I have actual healthcare) so I started back up again.
I guess HN is cool with self-promotion, so here's a jam I made with a looper pedal after about 2 weeks. I call it "More Theory Than Experience"
I've been playing the guitar for 20 years but I play as good as someone who has played for one year! I'm just not good at it. I love it, but I just never could get past some of the basic chords. It's very therapeutic though, so whatever. I'm enjoying it. :)
I tried and tried and tried to play guitar. Now I can play some chords and couple strumming patterns. My only goal was to sing some easy songs and play along. But it seems that singing along requires next level of mind bending.
So last week I ordered a drum kit (Yamaha dd75) and hope to have better luck with drumming. It’s a blast so far.
I took a rather circuitous route of playing and learning piano for 15 or so years (I'm 25 btw, I just started early) and being a massive theory nerd. I also taught myself piano until I got to college, which I think gave me unique perspective but I also know took waaay longer than it I'd just taken lessons. At the same time, I really enjoyed learning as a passion instead of a commitment. There were times I walked away but I always came back. That's just me though; if you learn better with the mild pressure of a teacher's tutting that's absolutely valid.
I've currently teaching myself as I just love exploring. I've watched some youtube videos about scales and I follow a few guitarists on youtube (samurai guitarist[0] comes to mind and Paul Davids[1] has probably been my biggest influence in my ability to play). Other than that, it's all been throwing all of my experience at it and seeing what sticks and what doesn't. Definitely record yourself once and a while to see what's working, and listen to a lot, both passively and actively, and try to spot what you like and really analyze it.
speaking of which, I've found music theory to be completely indispensable in my ability to self-study. Being able to take what I heard and internalize it, and being able to take what's in my head into my hands is absolutely essential.
You sorta motivated me to pick up guitar again... the sound of it makes me excited so gonna cont. with a course I bought on Udemy and see how far that takes me.
I'd also checkout Samurai guitarist and Paul Davids.
I'm primarily an iOS developer and wanted to start learning web development so I built two really simple sites:
http://pointillism.digitalbunker.dev/: I've always been into generative art, so I built this site that takes a source image and recreates it in a Pointillism style
http://gitrandom.digitalbunker.dev/ : Generally when I'm struggling to come up with project ideas, I'll just browse GitHub. This site lets you explore random GitHub projects by language and topic.
I built the sites using Vapor, so I could continue to use Swift and just learn one new thing at a time.
I'm probably going to pick up some iOS app too to leverage the new hobbies people are discovering being at home (i.e. bread making).
I've been writing a modern Zettelkasten-based note taking implementation. Planning to open source and release the initial version in a couple of weeks, the MVP is coming along nicely.
I was looking for a Zettelkasten note taking app which would 1. work on laptop and phone 2. wouldn't have any vendor lock-in and 3. wouldn't go away if a single company folded - couldn't find one, so I started writing one. I'm writing it as a PWA to make it available ~everywhere and planning to use dropbox/google drive/whichever as the backend so users will have full control over their notes.
I'm amazed how much you can accomplish with modern web tech stack. I can literally bypass any need for a server by having the user connect to their cloud! I can just create a PWA and publish it as an app! On the downside I've learned that some features are hard to implement with above requirements using PWAs though. For example, only Chrome supports some level of filesystem access, so storing notes locally would mean discriminating by browser, which I don't feel great about.
I just finished reading "How to take smart notes" by Sönke Ahrens. It's mostly about Zettelkasten. Been looking for a good tool to implement it. Didn't like any of them very much. Zettlr at least seems tolerable, and it uses plain old Markdown files so it's easy to store the notes in git.
Something with phone support would be nice, hell even just read-only mode would be great. Best of luck, and please report back if you can set up a landing page or a github repo or something else we can poll :-)
Amazing to see so many people have started working on something like this in the last few years. Mine is also command-line based and started out as a homegrown collection of shell scripts, but I've started rewriting it properly in Rust.
That's incredible. I decided to do exactly the same thing in go (since I'm trying to learn it) and have some pieces working. Mine is command line based and I'm trying to build in an Emacs mode for it since it's my primary interface.
I found a free espresso machine on craigslist (Gaggia Classic). It was old, rusty and "wasn't working". Spent time researching the model, took it apart and de-rusted and cleaned every part. Now it makes delicious coffee. Totally worth it
Real-time avatars with our deep computer vision pipeline; developed with GStreamer, Rust and LibTorch. This CV pipeline is usually used for training robots inside simulations and generating synthetic datasets. But given the circumstances, thought it would be fun to explore other use cases.
Cool work. I went bankrupt trying to turn similar tech into an advertising platform 15 years ago. Long before the term 'deep fakes' I had a fully functional photo to 3D avatar reconstruction pipeline and VFX production pipeline for realistic actor replacement in media. I went as far as acquiring global patents. But I was too early - no one believed what I was doing was possible in '08 (when I was pitching my working system to VCs). By '13 I was exhausted, broke and dismayed at the short sighted and entitled attitudes I'd encountered. I gave up and now work in facial recognition.
It's a RESTful server-side API for adding user authentication and authorization flows to your apps.
We've been taking a lot of inspiration from Stripe and mostly just wanted to use an auth service with docs like Stripe :)
(Please note this is still pre-pre-pre beta. The docs are incomplete and we have yet to even integrate it with our own apps, so please don't try to build an app with it yet!)
I applaud this and wish you luck. I'm a big cheerleader of Auth0 and have used them in the enterprise setting and in side projects. They do a lot of things right and have such promise for becoming the "why would you choose anything else" solution. They have all the mindshare of JWTs by owning jwt.io. But I must say that the documentation is truly awful, and I think that leaves them vulnerable for a competitor.
The core API docs are good, like the Management API Tester page. But the walkthroughs and general documents are full of broken links, inconsistent use of language, and varying levels of precision in how things are explained. You end up Googling for answers, finding community responses, and having to piece things together.
The way things are called APIs versus Applications is confusing no matter how you put it. Then they are sort of ambivalent in places. For example, look at the SPA guides. Sure, it'll walk you through the Implicit Flow for SPAs, but elsewhere they second guess themselves and say you shouldn't use Implicit Flow for SPAs. Instead, they say create a "Normal Web App". But good luck finding that specific article again just because you came across it once!
If anyone in Product or Biz Dev at Auth0 is reading this, I would urge you to make a case for "even easier mode" that abstracts a bit more and comes with better documentation. I found myself doing so much token management and head scratching about ID versus access tokens that I felt like I need to be a technical expert on the standards just to follow the directions and feel like my app is secure.
Auth0 has potential to actually solve identity in an easy way, but they are not meeting that promise right now, and that is your opportunity.
Hi psankar, we ran across Ory when we were doing our initial "does this exist?" Google search, but haven't actually looked into that project too deeply.
And we'd never heard of Keycloak before, so thanks for pointing them out to us!
Have you ever used or built with either platform? If so, what was your experience like working with them?
I have used (and still using) keycloak and gatekeeper for some projects which we use in prod as well. They are very good and stable, but require a lot of memory. I came across ory when I was searching for alternatives for keycloak. Keycloak is done in Java and the JVM is quite hungry. Also, there are no official helm charts etc. and the project does not feel cloud native. However, when the alternative is choosing auth0 and paying a lot of money, can't complain about keycloak.
I already think of Auth0 as being the stripe of the auth world. What frustrations did you run into with them, and what are your goals to differentiate with feather?
I really thought the same when we first integrated with Auth0 for one of our projects! Most of our frustration with them boiled down into 2 points:
1. The Auth0 universal login solution is not "white-label".
It requires pushing users to an auth0.com pop-up page which has rather limited customization options. Granted they do allow their customers to upgrade to "custom domains", but they up-sell on this point (minimum $23/month) which doesn't make it ideal for us bootstrappers just wanting to get a demo running.
We additionally had a handful of users mention our login flow felt insecure. We determined this to be more imagined than factual, but figured it was a result of the change in design language between our app and the auth0.com pop-up. It was particularly acute when transitioning from native iOS to a web pop-up when entering sensitive information.
The underlying feedback we kept hearing around the login flow was along the lines of “why am I giving my password to this sketchy-looking website rather than to your app?”
2. The Auth0 docs and interfaces are a maze!
We had a terribly difficult time piecing together tips and footnotes from the community support forums and tutorials on Google to complete the information provided in the docs themselves.
There were a number of steps we needed to implement which were completely omitted from the official docs. We found others were running into the same problems as well on the community support forums.
For us, this essentially resulted in a feeling that Auth0 was letting too much complexity bleed through the interfaces for the developer figure out themselves.
—
So these are the two driving reasons we started hacking around on Feather:
- To have a truly white-label auth API
- To have more intuitive interfaces and documentation
It's a nice mix of both online and offline work. Also, the community around here is mostly made up of various combinations of farmers, hippies, retirees, and permaculture folks. Everyone wants a decent internet connection, but no one really has the skills to do much about it. I've lived here a year now, so thought I'd give it a go.
It's a windy road. Actually, it all started out because I wanted to get fast internet for myself on my farm. Then I thought, "Hey, why not start a business?" Feature creep at its best.
I did WISP work for a while in snowy rural California. My biggest surprise is that my time was 90% construction (drilling through walls, snowshoeing out to climb towers, running cables, etc) & customer support, and about 10% fun networking and hardware configuration. We used mostly Mikrotik equipment for the backbone because it is dirt cheap, with a combination of Ubiquiti and Cambium radios. My favorite tool that I discovered is the open source "Splat! HD"[1], a radio viewshed generator that you can use to optimally place your towers, and find out if an end user should be a able to connect. Ubiquiti also has a similar tool commercially available.
That site was actually the inspiration for this. I saw it on HN a few years ago and it just stayed in the back of my mind. I hadn't really considered it as an option up until that point.
Something else I've found useful is RF Elements' YouTube channel. In particular this playlist [1]. I suspect they overstate some issues slightly in order to promote their own products, but I'm super impressed with how well the video's explain the topics.
If you aren't already, keep an eye on Starlink—when they start operating in Portugal I bet it'd be a real benefit to your business. Yours is pretty much the ideal use case.
Also, wow, living and coding in rurad Portugal sounds like a pretty idyllic life from here. Aproveite pra mim, né?
Thanks! And I hadn't actually thought of Starlink in that light, I had been assuming they would be competition. Could you explain your thoughts to me a little more? I'd be really interested to hear them.
This is amazing, I've been thinking of doing the same for my area. I've always wondered about the ping tho. Right now I have 4ms with my current provider which uses a wired connection. Whats the usual ping using radio? (from a client perspective)
The radio will generally add 2-3ms latency I believe. Plus any routing latency at the customer's router, and any latency in your own infrastructure. If one is comparing to satellite or LTE, then this is basically amazing. If you're comparing to existing copper/fibre connection then it will have some effect.
I'm saying this having not actually deployed the hardware yet, just based on research.
Depends on radio and network.
Right now, I'm on wifi (so it goes wifi -> router -> ISP radio -> ISP fiber) and have 2.5ms ping to one of the bigger DC in my city, so I guess it can be pretty good ;)
Solar battery powered defense system. I’m confident the zombies are coming for us and so I am preparing with a security system built on raspberry pi, esp32 & loads of gear from adafruit/amazon delivery. The final system should have perimeter sensors (pir and break light sensors) that active pan tilt tracking cameras and deploy a tracking drone (weather permitted) with laser pointer and scary sounding robocop ed209 voice...
So far I have a camera working that can sleep when no motion and wake back up if low battery after enough charge.
https://remottecoffee.com a tool to make easier how we keep connections online. Several weekends of confinement have helped one friend and me to shape and implement one of those projects we had in our personal backlog.
Because of the distance we are from each other, our friendship has relied heavily on phone calls and video calls. Some time ago, we started calling them, "remote coffees", "- Hey man, when are we having our next remote coffee?"
We met at the University, we spent about two years working for the same company and we have kept in touch during these years thanks to our "remotte coffees" and also due to the many concerns about technology and productivity we have in common. "This conversation should have been recorded!". We are sure this same thought came to you after some either formal or informal conversation you had. The challenge was simply to place a product live with as much free time as this quarantine allows, and here it is. We are not launching a super business, nor did we intend to, we both are fully dedicated to something else. We just wanted to launch this MPV and share it with friends and contacts.
We do have a lot more functionalities and ideas to put on it but, if you want to try it, those ideas will be much better by taking into account your honest feedback.
A truly valid problem. Myself i don’t like online communications with friends. It only makes me feel worse. it feels so incomplete and awkward. In person our convo is flowing much better
Not always you have the chance to keep communications on site. I am from Spain and I've moved to Germany a few years ago. I am working in an international company where there are people from everywhere around the world. I love to keep connected with all of them and a remote coffee sometimes is a good idea.
Took over all of cooking at home - all meals so as to give the spouse a break. Lesson learnt, cooking once in a while is fun but cooking every meal every day (in lock down from march 22nd) is really really hard since it requires meal planning and execution every day from the moment you wake up.
Decided to open source some of the personal projects of mine. https://github.com/vivekhub/password-generator and https://github.com/vivekhub/simplenote-backup. Nothing fancy but something I have been meaning to do and started doing it. Started learning K8S as well so that is a positive. Decided to setup a personal website https://www.vivekv.info as well and had to learn hugo to do that. So on the whole feeling good. Sorry about all the links and plugs but hey I am genuinely proud of what I have done :-)
I'm building a treasure hunt web app (for mobile). An app for exploring the city. Had to learn a lot about geo APIs. But may have a potential business model now for larger city-wide events. Have a redesign mocked up now. Started writing the week before Easter and finished the week after.
- Web geo APIs to guide you to the next "treasure".
- Webcam API to capture matching photo.
- "AI" for matching photos and answers to questions in the backend.
- the "AI" doesn't work well, planning to add a python Lambda with a better SSIM algo.
The hardest part so far has been permissions in iOS. If the user blocked geo permissions for Safari it is kind of a pain to enable again for a normal user. I haven't had a chance to test in Android yet but I presume that will present other challenges regarding permissions.
Since I can't play basketball with people, I built an app that helps me play basketball with myself. It uses object detection to identify me shooting and the ball going in or not and then creates a heatmap in real-time. Sort of like fitbit for basketball. I had to do some labelling myself, but it didn't take too long and it's working! I try to beat my shooting percentage from the day before. I put it on the Apple App Store to start and I'll build an android version next.
This is so cool!
It's been a while since I'd looked at Homecourt[0], but it looks like they've expanded quite beyond the shot tracking. Cool that you're competing against Steve Nash hah
This is super neat though, looking forward to following along. Would love to sign up for a newsletter if yas had one.
Thanks, man. I built it, showed some friends, and then learned there was a competitor, but that's cool. The world needs more than one and for some reason they don't offer anything to the billions of android users.
Based on my conversations with users, shot tracking is most used feature by far. There are a bunch of other services that help with dribbling [0] and drills [1].
I've been trying to get into deep learning and natural language procession. The cold start problem is real and there is lots of material out there with varying quality.
End goal: I'm based in the US now but come from a small ethnic group in Ghana (Konkomba) and recently came to the sand realization that our language will die over time. I want to build enough tools for translating to and from English and in the process perhaps learn things about language that fit with the models of the most popular languages today.
Unrelated, going to finally setup a personal website to host pictures and 99% chance it'll be WordPress-based.
I'm unexpectedly renting a house in Toronto. It ticks all the boxes, but is a bit of a junker.
Well, one of it's bedrooms was wallpapered and ancient looking. Very ugly. I decided to take care of it.
The wallpaper, and the three papers that came before it, are now stripped. The wall is in rough shape post-strip, and I'm repairing it. This room is on its way to perfection.
I've never done this before, and had no idea how much fun it is. There is no mistake that can't be fixed, and the instruction on YouTube is amazing. I'm having to reel myself in a bit, because I keep on noticing other things I'd like to fix myself. :)
It's sort of like the experience I had when I first started writing software. The power! My creativity is kicking in hard.
Would you have an email address or another way of contacting you? Your contact form / suggest a game links appear inactive at present. Would love to discuss something with you.
Add more family friendly ones. A simple way to do a pub quiz type of game would be awesome! We do one but showing the questions on screen would be great.
My side project kind of escalated quickly into a main project. I've been working on my own browser for the last couple months, and decided that I can improve a lot when it comes to using the web for automating and acquiring knowledge (i.e. the semantic aspect of it).
Currently on the verge of founding a (possibly viable) startup with it, but the browser itself is totally alpha for now.
Been working on parsers and protocols for a while now, and had to switch to TDD to keep my sanity together. Needed to write my own test runner that can simulate network behaviours (2G slow fragmentation is real) and peer to peer scenarios. Most servers out there don't comply with specifications, so making my own client- or peer-side implementations work was a hard task.
Currently writing my own SGML parser and optimizer, so that the browser receives only "linted and upgraded" html that is free of malicious parts, whilst embracing the idea of disallowing everything that could be potentially misused, including CDNs that do cache busting all the time.
The idea behind the browser concept is that trust is not established by default, and users should decide what website to trust, and match that with what kind of content they'd expect the website to deliver.
That is awesome. I've thought for a while that a worthwhile project would be a new ground up browser. I've been put off it because I'm aware of my own limitations. Back a couple decades ago I wrote an os (well toy os is a better description because like many projects you can write an os in a weekend and then spend the rest of your life and your 1000 best friends finishing it).
Anyway, IMHO, you should really focus on code clarity and hitting the high points with a good modular system. Ignore all the edge cases and if/when you open source it, that will allow people to focus on narrow pieces and make them more compliant.
The world doesn't need another rats nest like firefox and chromium have become. AKA you need to reinvent the konqueror of 1999 that spawned webkit/chromium.
I totally agree with you. Stealth currently is a PWA and reuses an existing Browser as a rendering engine or runtime. As the codebase is babelfree es2018 I am currently dependent on a modern Browser being preinstalled on the system (aka edgium or safari 12 and later) in order to use ESM modules.
I have no chance competing with google, so I’m probably gonna reuse as much of the servo project as possible when it comes to runtime and layouting/rendering. Currently a bit unplanned, on Android and iOS I have an experimental prototype up and running that’s just bundling nodejs-mobile and using a webview to localhost.
The browser UI (pwa ui) is served on port 65432 in order to allow userspace usage (ephermal ports can also be used by anyone on Windows).
> It is built by a former contributor to both Chromium and Firefox, and is built out of personal opinion on how Web Browsers should try to understand the Semantic Web.
Could you share more about this vision?
> writing my own SGML parser
How did you land on SGML?
What do you think of a browser/mode that parses markdown, so we can have a "markdown web" with less complex clients?
Phew, tough question. As I went into web development when XHTML 1.1 strict was the "cool shit", I kind of valued the aspect of using the web for acquiring and distributing knowledge. Not only for me, but also for publishing or other forms of media (e.g. by offering print stylesheets), screen readers, and semantic extraction of that kind of knowledge.
(I was also working on project(s) that were using DAISY to automatically convert websites into hearable formats to be consumable by blind people.)
Somehow from then (around 2000ish) to now, everything went to shit and nobody cares about that aspect anymore. News websites are too busy displaying ads and pushing subscription dialogs in my face (before I read a single line of their article) - rather than being readable or consumable.
And I kind of disagree with that. I want to make the web an automatable tool to acquire knowledge in an easy manner. And I hope I can do that programming-free. Currently, programmers can easily build scrapers - but imagine the possibilities once any person or kid can do that with a few mouse clicks.
I know there are a lot of proprietary scrapy-based solutions out there already, but honestly I think they're crappy. They see the web as DOM and not as a statistical model that a neural network "could" learn once you have a different way of rendering/parsing/modelling things.
> How did you land on SGML?
The reason why I am currently building my HTML(5) compatible parser with SGML ideas is because nobody closes tags. The spec is very complicated (especially while having an eye on what can be abused in the XSS sense or related security issues with CORS), so currently I'm kind of looking at a lot of parsers out there and try to find my own way of making this into a statistical model, so that in future my neural net adapters can optimize old HTML code into new, clean, HTML5 code.
> What do you think of a browser/mode that parses markdown, so we can have a "markdown web" with less complex clients?
Actually this was my first idea to build this. I wanted to convert all html to markdown and back, so that it's easier and cleaner. The issue I realized is that most markup and meta information that comes with a website is lost in markdown (or commonmark), and layouting sometimes implies structure, too - due to how websites in wordpress (or any user-friendly CMS) are being built.
Code-wise you usually cannot imply meaning by only looking at HTML, sadly, that's why I switched to a "filtering proxy-like" approach, whereas the Browser UI simply receives the upgraded, clean HTML, CSS (and webfonts or other assets).
This is a subject I've been fascinated with recently. The web isn't nearly as good as it could be at gathering, networking, and assimilating information.
I feel that one key aspect of something like this would be the ability to annotate anything on any page you stumbled across, and to navigate between all your annotations in a cohesive manner.
> (I was also working on project(s) that were using DAISY to automatically convert websites into hearable formats to be consumable by blind people.) Somehow from then (around 2000ish) to now, everything went to shit and nobody cares about that aspect anymore.
Yes, it's tragic that you could seamlessly compose streaming audio, video & text from multiple servers using an SMIL _text file_ in early 2000s, but it's all gone now.
Yet we now have large markets of broadband-connected humans with countless hours spent in front of streaming media (including video conferences) that they cannot annotate, inspect or compose. Then people wonder why they are "exhausted" after hours of Zoom meetings via powerless blackbox client apps.
There's still a tiny bit of standards activity on sync of A/V content with web text, part of the upcoming fusion of epub & the web, aligned with Google's "Web Packaging" that will enable a fully-offline internet with signed content (can of AMP worms).
> so that in future my neural net adapters can optimize old HTML code into new, clean, HTML5 code.
This is exciting work. Apple has a powerful ML/AI chip on recent iPhones, likely to be used for image processing and augmented reality annotation of live video. It would be nice to apply this silicon power to the semantic ambiguity in real-world human use of markup languages.
We need an alternate timeline fork of the security aesthetic of CSS "user" vs "publisher" stylesheets, which at least tried to formalize the inherent social/power/finance conflicts between stakeholders in the web content rendering pipeline. Of course, we've since added identity, device fingerprinting, keystroke timing and countless other minutiae to the arms race. But the fundamental need for separation of powers will never go away.
Many users have powerful silicon on their devices, but today it is rarely employed in defense of "user" stylesheet/reality parsers. The proxy architecture you are developing could be combined with fully-private "user" datastores, of the kind harvested today without consent, but instead customized by the user for their own objectives, with data always in their physical control. With local personalization and ML-powered disambiguation, the unfair playing fields could be tilted a little towards local autonomy.
> But the fundamental need for separation of powers will never go away.
... and I think that this was actually the job of web browser engineers, and they failed to do so. I kind of like where Brave is going to be honest, though I do not think that an optional approach will make a change. We've been there, a lot of times, and nothing will be changed if we don't force the industries to.
Honestly currently the only Browser that is doing the right thing when it comes to privacy policies of third party cookies is WebKit/Safari [1] [2] [3] as Apple has the leverage to enforce it via their iOS market share.
Firefox/Mozilla currently is too concerned about breaking things and Chromium is a bad privacy joke outside of Ungoogled Chromium.
> The proxy architecture you are developing could be combined with fully-private "user" datastores, of the kind harvested today without consent, but instead customized by the user for their own objectives.
Exactly ;) Can't talk about this more (for now as my startup idea has to stay under the radar until Q3 this year) but I think you've figured out what I want to do with this concept.
Thanks for the discussion, looking forward to using your work! Brave on iOS is interesting because it combines underlying Safari browser code with Brave's policy UX (e.g. per-site JS controls).
Did you consider building this on top of Chromium? It has to be so much more work to recreate a browser, securely. I mean, certainly, it is more than one dozen people can handle in a lifetime. Was there something about Chromium that doesn't work on a basic level?
> Did you consider building this on top of Chromium?
Currently, the Browser UI is actually just a PWA pointing to the nodejs instance and is reusing whatever rendering engine is available. I want to have a clean codebase, so everything is babelfree es2018 and will only run in edgium and safari 12+ (and chrome 70 or webkitgtk or webkitqt or firefox etc).
For mobile my plan is to bundle nodejs-mobile and just use a webview there, which is based on chakra (so it is JIT free and is technically allowed on iOS). For desktop I will probably unclutter servo modules and try to have a minimal fork that doesn’t have all the web apis I don’t want or need...but I’m not sure, as I’m not yet familiar enough with the servo codebase.
One thing is sure: I can’t create a competing rendering and layouting engine, so I gotta reuse an existing one.
I always wanted to have my app in the App Store. I started little before quarantine, and eventually published my first iOS app — a simple day counter, Countdowns (free with no IAP). It was my excuse to try SwiftUI, and learn how to distribute an app in the App Store. https://rusinov.me/countdowns
Stanford publishes Paul Haggerty’s course “Developing iOS Apps With Swift” free online. The whole class is small iOS app projects with source code available and he’s really great at walking through the code in the lecture videos.
I'm ashamed to share the code because I feel like I got so much wrong and code is not elegant. For learning purposes, Hacking With Swift videos by Paul Hudson helped a lot. https://hackingwithswift.com
Well, if the only thing stopping you is being ashamed, I can make a deal with you...
You put it on Github, and I'll review the app and suggests code improvements (probably not amazing since I don't do iOS that much, but I know some Swift, and a lot more experience with Go, Java, JS, etc.).
Up to you, but you should never be ashamed of the code if it works. It got accepted to appstore, it's good enough ;).
I am building an app for fire departments. Currently targeted at the german market.
The problem nearly every fire department which is based on volunteers have, is that it's hard to learn the location of all items on the different vehicles.
So i build a small quizz app to support the fire departments with this. Now every fireman can learn the location of the items on the go.
I wouldn't recommend Vaadin. I worked on a work project using Vaadin 10+. Despite 10 and 14 being LTS releases they felt like they should still be in beta, my team ran into countless bugs. Vaadin didn't fix any of these bugs with any sense of urgency, even with a paid support contract (obviously less relevant for a side project). Working on that project almost made me leave the company, and the use of Vaadin was a significant factor in that.
Not the OP, but figured I’d weigh in... I found it to be extremely productive when I used it for about 6 months. Only downside is that it’s not open source and some of its features are not free.
I'm trying to learn something about deep learning and do an end-to-end project with computer vision.
I have a raspberry pi and picamera and wanted to detect the pigeons in my balcony and then play a sound or something to shoo them away.
But it's going nowhere, I'm too dumb to even start properly :(
- Nvidia and CUDA stuff is so hard, I can't set it up properly no matter what
- Tried YOLO but without CUDA and OpenCV I can't run it in video. Don't know how to fix it
- Tried to copy other projects but can't find anything that I can parse with my amateur brain. I get lost and doesn't matter how many youtube videos I watch or stackoverflow pages I check, it's errors after errors after errors.
- Tried in windows but that's not viable. Installing Ubuntu nearly broke my pc and somehow a virtualbox messes up the whole thing. Currently looking at this.
So yeah big mess, I'm way over my head and it's not fun anymore. But I still want to shoo away the pigeons and love the idea of learning more about DL/CV but guess I need to learn about the basics first, practice in other things before doing this.
I’m also picking up deep learning with a focus on computer vision.
Do the first lesson of Fastai’s Practical Deep Learning for Coders — https://course.fast.ai/
It explains that trying to use your own GPU takes a lot of energy that you should focus elsewhere when you’re getting started.
Paperspace Gradient (referenced in the link) offers free Jupyter Notebooks with GPU’s you can use for 6 hours at a time (and re-start when they expire). You can get a classifier that distinguishes dog breeds up and running in less than a day and probably a few hours if you just watch the video and follow along with the notebook.
It's not you. I have decades of Linux development experience, I've developed machine vision systems before, and I have a doctorate. And twice I've given up in frustration while trying to just get the CUDA drivers installed.
I honestly don't know why nvidia hasn't made it simpler.
I'm so glad it's not just me, as other user said maybe I need to use some cloud notebook or go with CPU. Hopefully those options are more fruitful. Thanks!
Love the idea, I've wanted to do something similar. I don't have anything very helpful, but I'd guess that the reason virtualbox isn't working is because it doesn't have direct access to the graphics hardware. Just a guess though, I ran into a similar problem trying to run Kali linux in VirtualBox but didn't have a ton of success because the system didn't have direct access to the Wifi module. Alternatively, you could simply shoot the pigeons with a pellet gun and it would be just as fun.
The damned pigeons don't come to the balcony when I'm there, and make a mess everywhere. I don't want to hurt them just that they hang somewhere else!
My background is anthropology but I've always worked as a data analyst (read: excel guy) but got "promoted" as project manager for a team that has some data scientist doing automation projects and got interested in CV and NLP. I know python but for data analytics (pandas, seaborn, scikit, and so on) but never did anything for myself in DL and just wanted to learn more while building something (I miss doing stuff besides slideware tasks).
Regarding virtualbox, I will probably give up and look again into dual boot Linux. Will ask a friend that is an experienced coder to hold my hand while I do that.
Keep with it if you can. Again, I told have any hard experience in that area, but I'm a software developer by trade, and a geography person (kind of) by academics. Physical Anthro and Geo have some crossover, and both stand to be going in the direction of applying some DL techniques at present and going forward. Particularly in the areas of remote sensing if you want a rabbit hole to dive into :) Unix can be a nightmare, and you just have to suffer it for a while to get used to the patterns. Otherwise, My recommendation is to just work slowly through the bits and pieces. The amount of projects that people seem to have just slapped together in a weekend is daunting, but far from reality for everyone. The expectation of fast progress is the enemy of actual progress.
To setup CUDA, I highly recommend nvidia-docker. It makes it super easy, especially if you're familiar with docker. All you need is the official graphics drivers from the NVIDIA homepage.
YOLO will be slow on a raspberry pi. Try instead SSD MobileNetv2 with quantization-aware training and run inference with Tensorflow Lite; you should get at least a few frames per second.
I recommend starting with a pre-trained model (COCO, for instance) and finetuning for your images. However, even with finetuning you probably need > 10k images to get good results.
Once I read an article related to similar problem, The author was keeping track of specific birds and small animals at his back garden. As I remember, they used openCV and Tensorflow for project and trained system with images(may be 1000 images) set of birds. pretty much successfully identified birds most of the time.
I would drop CUDA and Nvidia mess, you don't need GPU neither for training or running inference, CPU should suffice.
I would start with running a pre trained network that's based on COCO set, on top of every frame that you get from camera. So basically you're doing object detection on images.
After the success of this POC, you can gather about 1000 images of pigeons together with transfer learning, again on the same pre trained COCO model.
Thanks for the heads-up! That's probably a lot more viable for my situation. I scrapped around 3000 images of pigeons from the internet hopefully it's enough for a decent POC.
I moved into a house late last fall, so I actually have some space to do so. This scratches multiple itches for me.
Itch the first: I've missed having a vegetable garden since I moved out of my parent's place and into apartment life years ago. While a small garden plot can't wholly replace the need to go to the grocery store for fruits and vegetables due to the inherent seasonality of growing food at small scale, it's damn hard to beat truly fresh fruits and vegetables that were picked not an hour before they landed on your plate. And any surplus left when the growing season is over can be preserved and stored for the winter.
Itch the second: It's _my_ creation, not my father's with which I am merely helping. When living with my parents, my father had his way that he'd like to lay the garden out. Granting that a man who grew up in a rural agricultural community probably knows a thing or about vegetable gardening, watching how he did stuff did always leave me wondering if there wasn't room for improvement. Since this is my garden, I can make my own experiments and decisions on how the garden is to be arranged, and what vegetables I want to grow (e.g dad loves beets; I do not). I've been reading about companion planting, and am eager to try things like growing corn and beans together, or growing chives near my peppers and tomatoes to keep aphids away (seriously, fuck aphids).
Itch the third: It lets me develop useful skills outside of my career in tech. While I have no delusions about quitting being a sys/net admin and going and becoming a farmer, I do think it's important to nurture useful skills outside one's main career.
Itch the fourth: I have something to automate with tech. Gardens do need to be watered. Under-watering will limit your yield, but over-watering is also harmful to both the garden and the wider ecosystem of one's immediate area. There's a goldilocks-zone when it comes to watering, and the just-right amount of water depends on a number of things: what you're growing, your climate, the soil, etc. There is a real danger that before the close of summer, the garden bed will have an automatic, multi-zone drip irrigation system, complete with soil-moisture sensors, controlled by a Raspberry Pi or similar SBC.
During April I built a loft bed frame out of framing lumber. I can post about that too if any of you are interested.
For companion (and succession) planting I'v made quick referential page [1] that I have collected, so i can use directly in garden.
It is really basic/unfinished, focused on Central Europe (also I'm planning to make it more general - as I'm currently gardening in Norway).
At the end I want to make something that will automatically recommend list of plants that I can plant on specific plot based on what is/was there previously. At the moment it is just list where I have to search manually for specific plants.
Sources are not clear there because it is mostly just for my personal use.
But for example for companion planting I'v processed wikipedia page [2]. Now I manually review sources from there, because not everything that is stated in the table is really supported by the declared sources.
I have spent every quarantine weekend in the yard and it's been magnificent and extremely rewarding. We had previously built raised beds but had limited success due to lack of regular watering so my first priority was repairing my entire drip line system and then extending it to the beds. Success!
Glad to hear others have garden / yard side projects as well. best of luck with the harvest.
I have a different approach. I water the raised beds, with a hose. I guess whatever gets you outside in the garden, is good. As they say, the best thing for a garden is, the gardeners shadow.
I will be watering with a hose as well, at first. If I waited until I had a drip-line system in place, I wouldn't have enough warm season left to get very much yield from whatever I managed to get planted. But I absolutely do intend to spend time in the garden. Gotta keep watch for weeds and check the various veggies for ripeness.
Housemates are allergic to cats and the dog owned by one of said housemates has killed cats in the past. And even if that were not the case, I happen to like the songbirds in my area, which would mean the cat would have to stay indoors.
I finally finished a little convenience tool I made for fetching lyrics for your currently playing Spotify song, called Spotify Karaoke.
Currently I'm working on an Electron app for automatically importing/managing screenshots and recordings from your Nintendo Switch, off the SD card. It matches the file name IDs (Nintendo uses these seemingly random IDs for each game) with the actual game name, moves it into a custom folder structure, etc.
Loooooove the Spotify karaoke tool. I have to know the words to songs I listen to so I started a local Electron tool (https://github.com/bradydowling/spotifylyrics) like this some time ago but then abandoned it.
It's great that this is web based and can be used on a device that you're not listening on.
Thanks for building this! It infuriates me that they have a widget that does display the lyrics but keeps switching to random trivia every 5s. There's an open bug on spotify to have it always show lyrics but doesn't seem to receive any love.
I think Spotify joined forces with Genius. And that trivia is from Genius. Sometimes the trivia is good, but I would have loved a simple lyrics widget.
This quarantine I decided to restrain myself from starting a new side project (many of you might agree that we've got too many abandoned projects) and just pick one from the abandoned queue.
My pick: http://seriesreminder.net It was going to be the first choice when you wanted a new series recommended or just wanted to see which tv shows will air this week.
It was still using Rails 5 and Sprockets so I had to make the proper upgrades (including migration to Webpacker) and revamped the design using React and MaterialUI. I wrote an article about that https://medium.com/@cionescu1/how-to-use-react-components-in...
My only goal moving forward is to find the sweet spot (not really MVP, but a nicely working state) where I can go back to just ignoring this project again
I started playing the new Animal Crossing and wanted a good reference for all the fish and bugs to catch. I wasn't happy with static tables that were hard to sort and filter, so I created the interactive reference tool that I wanted: https://ac-catches.com/
First site I've made with TypeScript, so at least I was learning something along the way.
I was continuously fighting my recipe planning. I did it for a long time in Google Keep. I can't manage recipes there, I have to add items to the shopping list manually. Changes in menu planning don't keep up with the shopping list, I forget to check the pantry. Etc. This time looked right to create something to mitigate the frustrations.
The technology is quite simple, it is a CRUD app in Flask with SQL backend. Everything is a docker container with data in a volume. UX is now quite limited, based on Fomantic UI. There is no goal to make it Saas, for friends I will just spin up a second instance.
I have been a software engineer for over a decade, but haven't been programming the last 5 years. Besides I am a fanatic home cook. So this looked like the perfect opportunity to have some fun again.
I have always wanted to learn DevOps. I use Heroku for almost all my apps, but I wanted to learn what is happening every time I do git push heroku master.
I started learning Ansible recently using the 'Ansible for Devops' book. I used the concepts mentioned in this book and used the author's Ansible roles as a starting point to create a playbook for deploying Rails 6 apps.
Building an audio chat tool in Rust akin to a walkie-talkie. The original goal was a hardware device that's pre-programmed to work with a group of other devices where you just push a button to talk and it gets broadcast to the whole group with high quality audio.
First I'm starting with just a software version because cross-compiling for the pi-zero is kind of annoying.
Intended to be used by our team as we work remotely, but hopefully it'll be open-sourced soon after.
Beginning work on solving the metadata problem in classical music. Specifically, for those of us who either buy CDs or download tracks from the Web--the metadata is generally badly formatted, partial, in the wrong language, inconsistent from track to track, etc.
The hoped-for result is that you can run the tool on a directory and it will identify the files correctly and insert the metadata so that it is all consistent and correct. You can then copy the files to your favorite devices, and easily find what you want, make playlists easily, etc.
My current stage is researching the current tools, which are all (so far) partial solutions and IMHO cumbersome to use.
Check out MusicBRainz. have done a pretty good job of the tools around music tagging. Following is the link of the similar tool you are woking on from these guys: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
> Beginning work on solving the metadata problem in classical music.
OMG, yes! While I know this is one of the classical (ha!) bikeshedding problems, and you'll never make everyone happy (and piss off a whole lot of them), I can only applaud your efforts. I'm as OCD about classical music metadata and code formatting as anyone, but when I saw that Go had a language formatter with an official indentation style, I loved it for settling a tired debate, even though I hate tabs for indent.
Neat. I implemented functionality like that for a media player, but it was years ago. The main issue we dealt with was the poor quality of the data, so I think we ended up with a combination of autodetect + store the original (incomplete) metadata so the user can always revert it if they find something wrong. Not a great UX, but GI/GO I guess.
Yeah, that is indeed a big part of the problem, as is anything that's crowd sourced. It's amazing in this day and age that the music companies themselves can't provide clean, consistently formatted metadata.
I've been making a iOS app which makes iOS apps. You can live preview your app instantly, and it integrates with git. (Right now, the git feature is only on the Testflight version, not the store version). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/app-maker-build-native-apps/id...
And yes I’ve thought about that, but I don’t know how to share a file system...yet.
And it’s real. I have a general solution for tricking SwiftUI to render different views at runtime. Some things are fake (such as photos) because I wanted it to work for a demo but I didn’t have things like a file system setup.
this is really cool. i think that all developers at some point end up writing a CHIP8 emulator. I've done mine in C back in the day. It's as easy as it gets and you get some basic knowledge on what goes into an emulator. again: really cool
My cofounder and I threw together a virtual table quiz platform. We stream the questions on YouTube live and accept the answers through a web app I built.
We've been able to host quizzes with over 250 teams, scoring their answers in real time. The scoreboard is auto generated and players can make a contribution with stripe.
So far we've given over 6k euros to various local charities. I'm very proud of what we've achieved so far.
No. Right now it's just our two weekly quizzes (Tuesday and Friday) from Ireland, one quiz from California (Friday) and a couple corporate quizzes we host for companies, maybe one every two weeks.
Speaking of baked goods, I nursed a sourdough starter back to health. I found it in the back of the fridge where I'd neglected it for a couple of years. Poured off the icky gray liquid and scraped off the ugly top layers, and carefully got a pinch of relatively clean but inert looking dry starter crumbles from the bottom. I put that in a fresh jar and have been feeding it, and after a few days it came right back to life and is smelling great! Now to make some bread or pancakes with it.
My other project is harmonica karaoke. I'm not a blues player, I'm more into classic rock and country. Since I'm not that good at improvising, I like to take a song and work on it over and over again to work out a nice part and get the nuances just right.
One is Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, where I play the vocal lead with some jazzy stuff mixed in. I live a few blocks from Menlo-Atherton High School, where Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham met, so it's always fun to play one of her songs. (Harp: Lee Oskar F Major retuned as a high octave C Melody Maker.)
Another is Wagon Wheel, where I worked out the fiddle and organ parts plus some piccolo parts that I made up. (Harp: Lee Oskar A Natural Minor.)
My new lockdown song has been Atomic by Blondie. This one has been super fun! It took a lot of experimenting and trying stuff out, but I came up with an arrangement I'm pretty happy with. Now to beta test at our next Alteryx Got Talent virtual show! (Harp: Lee Oskar E Natural Minor.)
Maybe when we can all do it again, I will get to play some of these songs with other musicians.
I've had a feeling that certain state scratch off lottery games can be beaten thanks to certain actions the states take in the name of transparency. For example, they publish daily reports of the number of prizes remaining.
A simple example is imagine a game with 10 tickets sold for $1 each and a single $9 grand prize.
If 1 ticket is sold each day and if the lottery publishes the number of remaining winning tickets each day, then you can just wait 1 day and if 1 ticket was sold and 9 tickets remain and the prize wasn't claimed, well now there is a 1/9 chance of winning $9 and the expected value is even.
I started scraping several state for daily numbers and calculating the expected value of each game. Every now and then one gets over 100% EV. (Not taking into account annuity discounts and taxes)
It's also an excuse to try out a lot of different technology and patterns that would be too experimental for most real jobs, so it's a great side project.
Another fun little side project that was also an excuse to work with Clojure was https://ezmonic.com/. The app was built with ShadowCLJS, Re-Frame, and ReactNative. I've used the Major System mnemonic to remember things like my credit card numbers and I've always wanted to know how optimally short the mnemonics I come up with are. That app uses the CMU phonetic dictionary to search for an optimal phrase.
Re: Ezmonic, would be cool to have a live version on the website, so I could try out some numbers that are personally relevant and see if I could remember the system, before deciding to download the app.
A web version was my first iteration. It's pretty barebones, but it's available. http://ezmonic.net (Note that it's only served on `http`, so don't put any credit cards in there.)
It's a good idea though to add a web version to the "marketing" page at ezmonic.com. I'll add that to my todo list. Thanks!
Very cool! Wonder what the stats are on how long a winning ticket goes unclaimed. Like maybe the winning ticket has been sold already but not yet claimed.
You're right :) I do have a calculation for "lag" of tickets over a certain amount. Most states require tickets over $600 to be claimed at a lottery headquarters, not a gas station, so there is a noticeable lag in the percentage of remaining tickets over that value. I average out that lag per state, adjust the remaining tickets, and round to the nearest whole number.
I've been creating a single track mountain bike trail at my parents farm. Learning how to build sustainable trails, manage erosion, using proper grading on hills, and build fun features has been a great challenge. It's like extreme landscaping and woodworking combined. Then you get to ride your creation. I've been running the "operation" a lot similar to creating software with sprints, testing, and planning -- excepts sprints are hard labor, testing is riding bikes, and planning is waking up in the middle of the night with an idea for a new line.
There's a book by the IMBA (International Mountain Bike Association) that has extensive guides on how to create all sorts of features sustainably.
I've launched a side project to let people track the outcome promises/predictions made by public figures and popular Twitter accounts, as I find unrealistic predictions and outright lies can be very damaging:
This is interesting, but I'd love to see a different take on the idea of binary "this is wrong" and "this is right".
Take [1] for example, it lists the source as [2]. However, the source as claimed in [2] is reported as:
"Department of Health and Human Services confirmed".
You might not want to turn it into a "wikipedia", but it would be nice to offer the following:
1) Wrong reports and right reports - a list of sources that suggest whether the claim is factually sound or not (this could be news reports like CNN). You can pull together many sources in a given topic to support a claim
2) "Authority sources", for example, DoJ or other official information distributors that are claimed in an article.
3) "Linked news sources" - These days, many news sources are rehashes of rehashes, sometimes there are 4/5 chains before you get to the "authority" source (reported by the Verge which was detailed by Tech Crunch which was first outlined by AReallyCoolBlog). It would be nice to have a "trail" of where the news/source/information came from, and how many links there are in the chain.
Thank you very much for taking the time to provide detailed feedback.
1) Fake quotes do concern me, but for now I've settled on requiring a single reputable source, preferably the primary source (so in your example the DoH press release, if available, would actually be a better source). I've also provided a 'Report quote' button to let users flag fake quotes. I am planning to allow users to validate and/or post additional sources for quotes.
2) I've considered adopting a whitelist approach, but given I can't possibly know all the relevant sources for all the topics which can be covered, I'm just manually accepting quotes for now (the 'does it look credible to me?' test). Things might get even more interesting if/once I start getting quotes/sources on a topic I know nothing about or even in a language I don't understand.
3) Tracking down the primary source is definitely an issue I've already run into when trying to post the first quotes. Ideally, I would like to only accept 'primary sources', even though I know it takes extra work to provide them. Maybe implementing what you suggest in 1) would help with that.
Another feature I'd really like to implement is to automatically archive (on the Internet archive's Wayback machine) the source once I validate it, so that quotes don't lose their sources over time.
Good project. I think it is unfortunate that we pay too much attention on such promises/predictions. We should treat as we do horoscopes, palm reading, etc. Nobody knows the future. I think we can make some broad educated guesses. At times I feel sorry for the public figures that make promises. In some ways the whole setup forces them to do so. Such promises make for good headlines, soundbites and could even swing elections. In some ways they're playing to the audience. No matter how many times they get it wrong we still come back to hear more promises/predictions. It might just be in our nature to do so...
Thank you. You raise a very interesting point, and I completely agree that predictions should be given much less importance. But, as you say, it is human nature to trust people who look confident, and therefore predictions do hold weight and a lot of people abuse that.
I disagree about promises though, I believe if you promise to (not) do something and then break that promise, you should be held accountable for it. Otherwise, people will keep promising more and more outlandish things, because you eliminate the downside.
Agreed. It's absolutely reasonable for a politician (for example) to get into power and discover that for some reason they can't do the thing they promised to do, but I'd love it if they'd just briefly say so and why, rather than brushing it under the carpet and assuming noone will remember what they said while they were campaigning.
"I know I said I'd increase funding for schools by 20%, but that budget is controlled by local authorities rather than by my office - I'm going to increase funding to local authorities by X% instead and ask them to fund schools" - that kind of thing (although, you know, you'd hope they'd know about the funding infrastructure before making promises).
Good point. I would say that even if we know how funding works we cannot predict the future. We do not know what circumstances will prevail at the time actions/decisions need to be made. With the best of intentions it is still possible to have to renege on a promise made. My argument is don't make promises. But even where they are made we should just read them as a general statement of intent. As an example a certain government promised to conduct 100,000 covid-19 tests per day by a certain deadline. When the deadline hit they only got as far as 80,000+ or so. They got hammered for failing to meet the target. But I'm thinking yes they missed the target but we're a lot better off than when the promise was made. If they hadn't made any promise and achieved the same result the press might have celebrated it (probably not).
That’s a cool idea. I also notice that a lot of times there’s a news story without any follow up. For example, someone gets arrested for a big crime like murder or rape. They might never write about it again. Did they go to trial? How can we improve follow up in our news sources?
Thank you. Follow up is definitely also an issue, see also stories based on a scientific article which is then retracted. I guess information overload is partly responsible, there's always something new happening somewhere.
I've tried to address this by only accepting quotes with a 'due date', so I can easily bring them back into the spotlight (top of the home page in the Open section) once they can be assessed.
If it's a local level crime, a decade ago local news had the resources to put someone in courthouses and report on cases as they happen. Incentivize follow ups by supporting local news and journalists who provide them. You can also reach out to show interest.
This is fantastic. I've had a very similar idea kicking around in my head for a very long time.
These days it seems impossible to make sense of all the predictions from so-called experts. Tracking the accuracy of the talking heads is a great place to start measuring just how valuable their information is.
If this is a topic you're interested in, I strongly recommend Philip Tetlock's book Superforecasting. The Good Judgment project that he helped launch uses Brier scores to assess forecasters.
Thank you everyone for your feedback, it's very motivating to see that so many people find this project interesting. I might turn this into a Show HN soon, once the site fills up with some interesting predictions.
On the technical side, the logs show over 6600 unique visitors in the last 12 hours, with over 1100 of them (and 18k requests) during the busiest hour. I know that's not too impressive, but it's still good to see the basic VPS running the server didn't break a sweat (load average peaked at around 0.1).
In the mean time feel free to post content you're interested in, and also contact me (e-mail is in my profile) if you have any feedback. Thanks again!
I'm interested in building a site in the same way (Django + Intercooler + VanillaJS). Do you have any recommended projects/readings to look into? Or do you have any thoughts on other alternatives (StimulusJS + Turbolinks / Unpoly)?
but in the end I did something slightly different: for actions I just have in my views:
if 'X-Ic-Request' not in request.headers:
# render full page (which includes the fragment template)
else:
# render fragment template (which Intercooler will interpolate into the page)
That way, should I get to that page by any other way (user has disabled JS, I have a link in my page because I want a full page reload), it still works fine. Hope this helps.
I had a look at Unpoly, that looks very interesting and could simplify the backend code even more.
Yeah, Django's documentation is top notch, but I haven't seen a lot about mixing Django + Intercooler. That's a cool approach to make sure the actions are always reachable. Will read these, and maybe reach out to you sometime to find out how you like Unpoly! Thanks!
This looks really cool, nice! I don't want to look like I'm spamming links, but I posted a comment yesterday about an Elixir course I've been doing - they have a great Liveview one too. You might be interested :)
Those are the videos I've been watching just to get a better idea of the concepts -- I agree, they are well made. I actually found them via HN about a week ago.
Yep, that's the liveview one I started with :) They have a general Elixir/OTP one too: https://pragmaticstudio.com/courses/elixir - which is the one I mentioned in my other comment (in addition to the discount code LIVEVIEW).
I really like that course because you basically hack a web server together, and then refactor it to be kind-of like the Phoenix architecture, which for me is the perfect way to learn something like that. Toward the end they do the same with GenServers - hack together a stateful server, and then refactor it so it looks like a GenServer, before introducing the actual thing as a drop-in replacement. That's where I've got up to so far, but I'd definitely recommend that course if that sort of thing appeals to you and you like their teaching/video style.
That book looks great too, thanks for sharing :) Reading the author section, I'm definitely tempted to pick up a copy.
Just yesterday I had a talk with my friend with the PR industry. We have been discussing how to select the best information sources and became to the idea that the future will be some kind of rating system based on pair experts-field of knowledge. After that, I start to think about creating some kind of automatic system for fact-checking facts in articles at least numerous ones (like based on world population and companies valuation and other public data). Do you have anything like this in your backlog?
Thank you very much. My initial goal, should the number of quotes get too large for me to follow up myself, is to tag quotes and invite volunteer experts in a specific field to moderate quotes tagged by certain keywords.
Automating that sounds very attractive, but I wouldn't even know where to start. NLP? I've heard algorithms are sometimes used to automatically make trades based on news stories, so I imagine such a system could initially help moderators by providing suggestions/assessments?
I'm sure this is the right idea to invite people to volunteer for checking information, but this creates needs to build some kind of rating or double-checking system for volunteers too (something like Wikipedia authors/moderation system).
About fact-checking. I think this feature contains two big parts: 1) extract a fact from the text 2) to check a fact
For 2nd task probably needs to create some kind of "fact-tree" (something like Word population>USA population>target audience for service potential audience...)
I completely agree, I think the next step will be to open up user accounts (but keeping them optional), so that I can get a track record for registered users and invite the most active/correct ones to start moderating. At the moment I can go through the submissions myself and it doesn't (yet) take up that much time.
I find the other part (automating validation) fascinating intellectually, but I'm currently focusing 100% on implementing the functionality of the site itself (Reddit integration is at the top of the list), so this will have to wait. If you're interested in discussing this further at any time, you're more than welcome to also reach out (my e-mail is in my profile).
That's a very good (related) idea, I'll have to see how it can be integrated.
I've been thinking a lot about what makes a prediction/promise testable. So far I've summarized my conclusions in the 'How it works' page, but if anyone has any references on this I'd love to hear about it.
Great project. Thanks.
With predictions, I've noticed a trend where a person will appear on TV and make prediction after prediction that are wrong. And they don't seem to feel even a bit shy about making further predictions with apparent certaintity.
Like, they will go on cable news and say, I know about this stuff, and I guarantee that X will happen to Trump by June. And the commentator never says, "but you predicted that he wouldn't actually run for office (wrong), wouldn't win the nomination (wrong) wouldn't get elected (wrong), would get impeached by January (wrong), etc. Maybe you shouldn't be so sure in your predictions?"
I think on cable news you can see different treatment of “MSNBC/FoxNews/CNN analyst...” who are under contract to the network for regular appearances vs. guests that are unpaid. Other than the phrase I quoted above it isn’t always obvious (especially to casual viewers) that the host is talking to a colleague.
Thank you. That was one of the reasons I started the website, I think we desperately need experts, but it's getting more and more difficult to tell the charlatans apart from the experts outside our own field. Glad to see I'm not alone.
You could add a section for post-checking of /r/futureology type techno media sensational claims about how this or that ground breaking new xyz which works great in the lab on rats etc and will fix everything for you!
These overly optimistic/negative press releases can also be damaging to public understanding over time.
I've started work on Reddit integration (/u/OnTheRecordBot -- it will be a bot you can call, similar to RemindMe!).
Tags are also already present in the backend, but not yet implemented. I imagine they will be come necessary once the number of quotes/topics increases.
Great project! I've been doing this manually on HN and found the predictions I was tracking to be totally wrong. Please continue on this project, I'm not a movie critic but I give this project two whole thumbs up.
This is great! I've been wanting to do something similar for a while, to call people out for making unfounded assertions - with the goal of trying to encourage more humility in making predictions.
Thank you! I handle this at the moment by requiring manual approval before the content becomes visible on the website (I customized the Django Admin interface a bit), but should the number of quotes become unmanageable I'll start looking for other moderators.
Edit: Also, we try to follow our guidelines on what a promise/prediction should be, you can find them on the 'How it works' page.
I have been working on a lot of side projects actually. The first is a Corona app that I built to dump all my research and frustration when the lockdown first happened. When I realized I could not publish it to the app store I reached out to the CDC in West Africa and they are picking up the app. That was exciting.
The second project is a custom deck of cards, but instead of the Typical King, Queen and Jack it is royalty from Nigeria and has had an amazing response on Kickstarter
Thanks! Obviously it's still small, but I think it would be cool if it got bigger and people would be able to chat and ask real questions about a site to other real people on it rather than asking the employees through chat who would be biased.
I've been working on an interactive music-to-light device! It's a few LED stripes connected to a Raspberry Pi and they take sound input from an AUX-in and can be controlled with a PS3 controller.
It's all written in Rust. I started to pursue the idea as a "Getting started" project for Rust, because audio needs to be processed in real-time and so a fast language was needed. It turned out quite well and I really like Rust now!
I built Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/), a local Markdown file based knowledge base app. It supports internal linking and graph view, and recently added multi-pane capabilities too. It's looking more and more like an IDE for your knowledge by the day, and it's quite amazing at that.
This one's really silly but I got excited to build it out for my own entertainment.
It's called Who Paid More (https://whopaidmore.com) and the idea is pretty frivolous. Every day (EDT) you volunteer an amount you want to pay to see how your amount stacks up against others for that day. Think ranking and relative % across users for that period and the ability to share those results. Not much more to it at the moment.
I feel a little stuck trying to think of what would make it more fun/novel/rewarding besides just being curious about what people put money into.
Some buddies and I were talking about a similar site (https://whopaid99cents.com) that spawned the idea for this.
I found the original concept so absurd but amusing that I wanted to make my own version!! It’s been a welcome distraction as you can imagine and could be the basis for something more. Tbd...
I feel like the main thing that could make it work is the idea of other people also paying and competition/status ... so having a barren homepage without any other avatars/signs of life is probably the wrong way to go. Also I think there's an opportunity for the site to feel more fun / gamified and less academic. (i.e. maybe HOW SHOULDST OTHERS REFER TO YOU rather than Your Name, that sort of thing). Have some more fun with the idea and see where it takes you.
I feel like if you were able to make it more like milliondollarhomepage it could take off. Something where the result of paying money is made more publicly visible. For me it's missing the aspect that makes me want to talk about it to friends.
I've finally started working on my game based around markets and trading in a fantasy setting.
I've got a very naive global market running with some incredibly dumb bots, and am currently implementing local markets with their own needs/wants.
It's multiplayer by design so hopefully at some point I'll have some nascent player-base competing with each other =)...
I'm trying to keep everything simple and scope small.
To be honest, I wasn't really expecting anyone to ever be interested in my toy project, beyond spending a half hour idling their time, but a friend of mine has already started kicking the tyres which is very exciting, he's written a bot that scrapes the site and trades against it which I find hilarious.
There's far too much I could write here about ideas, but I'm just trying to keep my mouth shut and make it ;)...
Sure, I'm a big fan of the paradox game lineage, but I'd like something a bit less focused on warfare, not that I don't think combat isn't important, but I'd like to see what focusing on different mechanics does.
So the game runs a simulation under the hood and my goal is to slowly build up it's complexity over time, talking to players about what mechanics they find interesting / fun to focus on initially =)...
The global market is modelled like a stock market, it's still very primitive, but the companies and organisations in it have their earnings driven by spending activities of agents in the system.
I'm working on also having these agents also acting locally against more commodity like goods, which provides local a more local market as well.
The real fun comes in when my demand system get's hit with the effects of supply chain, I'm still trying to work out good levers to give players so that they can interact with the underlying sim. Well more than hire a bunch of adventurers to set the local docks on fire anyway... ;)
This will allow for two main ways to play:
1) trading against the market and if players want to build bots to do this, have at it, just be polite to the server... Heck if there's enough demand I'm happy to bring trading bots into the game universe.
2) Travelling from location to location to trade against the local markets, I've got some ideas for maintaining limited information, but to be honest we'll see what's fun =)...
The server itself is currently running in "alpha" mode, what that means is that anyone who registers an account has their details stored, but their character data is ephemeral and gets reset when the server is rebooted.
I'm of mixed minds whether to have the game still run in "ages" where the world does get periodically reset, so players get a history of how they did, sort of like a high score board/achievements, or to keep data around. I'm more leaning to the first, but it's hard to say whether players will like that =)...
There's more that I've thought about, but to be honest I'd rather walk before I can run ;)...
This is awesome! This is exactly what I've tried to implement multiple times but got lost in details of how to actually build a market. I'm a huge paradox fan as well if that helps :)
My thoughts were based on this really old niche game called "hard war" in the 90s where a player owns a ship and ferries goods between systems trying to make a profit in between. It gets complicated by the fact that there's rogue agents trying to kill you, cops trying to nab you when you ferry contraband etc.
My thought was to implement something like that with real functioning markets and planetwide events affecting commodity prices with hundreds of planets. It could even have some Stellaris like flavor where different kinds of planets have different resources they need to import just to survive. However I couldn't really figure out what the "fun" bit of game play would be beyond reading game generated news stories and trying to make a profit by running a trade route.
I had a couple of thoughts around putting in a mission tree somehow along with trade routes, automating trade routes and making it about competing corporations (ala medieval strategy games) but didn't get too far w.r.t. how the game mechanics actually work.
To be honest I think it's super easy to get lost in the details, I'm constantly fighting the impulse to do something more than the obvious idea that gets something working and once the pieces come together, I'll be better able to see how things fit together =)...
I've never heard of hard war, but it seems to have that old-school elite gameplay?
In terms of finding the fun, it's hard to say? I believe a lot of that will come down to giving players a decent view into what's going on in the world around them, good ways to interact with the system and making sure that player has interesting things to do.
Automating actions such as setting up trade routes is something I've been thinking a bunch about, I've just got to be careful that it doesn't leave the player feeling like they have nothing to do, factorio and the zachtronics games do some cool things here, but one thing at a time ;)...
I don't have a public repo to be honest, at the moment I'm more fixated on trying to get enough of an mvp together that it feels like a basic game.
It's also all in clojure, which I'm sure someone will tell me is a terrible idea, but it's working pretty well so far and eh, work with what you know =)...
That's one thing, but also I'm trying to keep the narrative mechanically driven to an extent, so having the world move into a new "age" there's opportunity for players to explore alternative branches =)...
So for about two years I've been bouncing around an idea in my head to make the LZ78 compression algorithm (or more specifically, the LZString variant of it) compress better by forgetting the least commonly used substrings. I think I'm just reinventing a mixture of LZC and LZAP (or LZMW), but the on-line literature discussing either algorithms in detail is abysmal[0][1][2]. The main innovation would be that I have a fairly simple way to implement the forgetfulness.
Another separate innovation that I have in mind is combining that with a special run-length encoding sequence that, due to the interaction between LZAP and run-length encoding, actually wouldn't encode runs linearly but exponentially[3]. That is, instead of "repeat substring X for N times" it would say "repeat substring X for fibonnacci(N) times". I suspect that might actually be a novel innovation!
Aside from a lack of time and energy, the main thing holding me back has been, and I'm dead serious, off-by-one errors. It's really, really easy to screw up the order of adding new entries to the dictionary on both the compression/decompression side in such a way that you just get garbage out, and it's a pain to debug.
If my algo turns out to be original, I'm tempted to call it LZWAN, or Lempel Ziv With Amnesiac Nodes (referring to the nodes in the trie used to grow the dictionary).
Digitizing some old family movies. On the lockdown front, it's been nice seen pictures of family. Technically, I've had a number of side quests along the way that were more challenging than actually digitizing the old tapes.
If you're thinking about doing the same, for formats and media, I settled on:
DVDs: yes, they're old, but they support more resolution than VHS, and practically every new Bluray player still plays them. Also, DVDs support 352x480 resolution. It's still more than VHS, and you can squeeze more content on the disc or encode it at a higher quality.
VP9+Opus+webm on a DVD. This codec/container combo is supported by Firefox, Chrome, Windows Media Player, and Android, so while new, I expected it to be supported for a long time. AV1 looks promising, but probably not ready.
I'm not bothering, but for iOS, use x264 and AAC in an mp4 container. Those were the only modern codecs and containers I got to work. Also, Apple, x264 and x265 are good, and all, but there's no excuse to not support VP9.
I'm saving the unencoded files as ffv1/flac in an mkv container.
For the actual DVDs, I'm using MDisc archival media.
I've been making a personal information/task management system that I can only describe as a weird cross between Things for Mac and Dropbox Paper. It's really an opinionated tool designed specifically for myself to be run on a desktop.
It's a buggy work-in-process app built in Svelte and PouchDB and definitely not in a "Show HN" state yet. I put my progress up on Github pages for close friends to try [1], but what the heck, I'll put it here too (no instructions or videos yet).
I honestly haven't figured out what I'm going to do with it long term, whether to make it free or to try to monetize it somehow. Right now, my main goal is to fold it into an Electron app and have it sync with a Couch/Pouch db server once the main UI code is done.
Note it's not a Saas, so no sign up required to try it. PouchDB is storing the data in your browser in IndexedDB so you can delete your data by clearing your browser data for that URL.
I couldn't find a satisfying NodeJS full-stack for web app development that would be have: TypeScript, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, ReactJS, Material-UI, docker containers where the same backend image used for development would get deployed on production, while the UI production machine would be an nginx image with the assets generated at build time.
I actually started to work on this in December, but I published it a few days ago.
Please beware that in order to use it for your projects right now you'd have to be quite comfortable with the nodejs ecosystem because the whole stack is not quite tidied up.
I am also working on this! I used Node a lot 5 years ago and not much since, so I'm coming up to speed on TypeScript and various other things. I'll check your stuff out. I may throw mine away.
I love a lot of things about the Node ecosystem, but the fact that being out of it for 6 to 12 months means you fall behind is not great.
The main components I used, are: NestJS with Express as an app server, KnexJS as a query builder (because people seem to not like TypeORM that much, it lacks migrations and you have to go pretty fast to custom SQL queries), NextJS for the UI.
Yeah, I totally feel you with falling behind regarding the full-stack web dev with node/react, the pace is incredible.
I started down the road with TypeORM for my starter, and I ran into several pain points. I was reading the Knex docs last night actually, heavily considering switching. I also wrote a quick `pg.ts` file to just use node-postgres directly, but the lack of migrations is just too painful. I looked at db-migrate briefly but didn't come to any conclusion.
So that's a long way of saying, I think Knex was a good choice. Provides migrations, handles connection pooling and transactions, but doesn't deviate too far from SQL.
With the last commit in master in late 2018, SemanticUI seems a bit deserted.
Anyway, in order to change it, you should discard everything non-nextjs and non-docker related from the client/ folder, like client/common/, client/components/, client/helpers (except client/helpers/configureGraphQL.ts), client/icons, client/layouts, client/theme, client/pages/{login.tsx|signup.tsx|dashboard/}, remove the material-ui related stuff from package.json and then proceed installing the SemanticUI.
A mix of playing Piano, working on an set of XMPP related libraries and tools in Go, and trying to get a handful of internet drafts accepted by various IETF working groups.
Digital piano lessons over meet.jit.si aren't as great as in person, but at least I'm able to keep up with it. Currently working on Liebesträume and Handel's Sarabande on the classical side of things and In The Mood on the jazz side.
The XMPP library is going well and I'm hopefully about to start rewriting the authentication bits: https://mellium.im/xmpp/
And finally, I've got some I-Ds submitted and in discussion in the IETF's TLS and KITTEN working groups. One that documents best practices for authentication and password hashing and storage: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-whited-kitten-passwor... and one that defines a channel binding mechanism for making tokens and secrets only valid over a specific TLS session (right now it's specific to SCRAM based auth, but that will likely change soon): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-whited-tls-channel-bi...
Writing assembly code and see it running on your own emulator feels awesome. Yesterday I started to implement simple text rendering using the GBA bitmap modes.
I also added a WebAssembly port using emscripten (which was easier than expected for a SDL2 based application).
* Built a table from a home depot butcher block and steel pipe. Felt great to work with my hands.
* stealthcheck[0] - Service health monitoring with email alerts and automated restarts in <150 lines of code. Just create a checks.json config file where each check includes a check command, interval, and on-fail command. Set up multiple stealthcheck instances all pointing at each other for redundancy.
* quarantest[1] - Most CI testing tools focus on automated tests, but sometimes the changes are very visual and you just want to give your team a demo of your pull request to play with. quarantest runs a build for each GitHub PR, generates a URL for the build, then posts a comment on the PR with a link to the build. You can see an example of it in action here[2]. Still in a pretty hacky state. Probably would be better to use the GH status API with a link that goes to a page listing all the past builds from the PR instead of spamming comments, but it's getting the job done.
I'm launching my side-project, Responsively, on ProductHunt today after a couple of months of work.
It is a dev-tool intended to make responsive web apps development faster.
Key Highlights:
- Mirrored User-interactions across all devices.
- Customizable preview layout to suit all your needs.
- One handy elements inspector for all devices in preview.
- 30+ built-in device profiles with the option to add custom devices.
- One-click screenshot all your devices.
- Hot reloading supported for developers.
- Free forever and open source - https://github.com/manojVivek/responsively-app
Installed and had a quick poke around at it with some of my sites. It looks great to me and while I don't have anything more constructive to say, I'm going to try it out in my workflow. It seems way faster than using Chrome dev tools to just "spot-check" things.
Kudos for not over-complicating the product in some weird struggle to find the one key thing that users would pay for and find a way to insert friction there, but of course that means you don't have a near-term way to get paid for your work either.
Edit: I do actually have something constructive to say. The "Help" menu on Mac OS v0.1.1 all points to the default electronjs content and not to content/community discussions about Responsively.
Well i've got a few, but finishing a number of "digitization" projects I've had on the back burner for years. As I type this, i'm flipping 3.5" floppies from the early 1990's I've had stashed away in a closet for the past 25 years. Its mostly automated. I'm using a high speed floppy drive (with laser tracking) to image the disks. Then I mount them and copy the files off to the NAS. The drive also has a soft eject (like all the old mac drives). So it just sits there buzzing away until its done then it ejects the floppy. About every 40 seconds or so I pick it up, and stick the next one in the pile in.
Working from home puts this within arms reach all day long. So while sometimes I get really busy and ignore it, when I become aware of it I start flipping floppies again. Once every few dozen floppies when a label read fails/etc then I type in a new disk series and let it rip.
I did all the music CD's a few years ago, most of my 8x10 photos last year (the fastfoto 640 is awesome, it needs a bigger feeder though).
Next up are the 5.25"s, and a bunch of QIC80 tapes I used like floppies in the mid 1990's. I've also got a stack of harddrives from the past ~30 years I need to capture.
Of course I've got the usual set of small projects as well, but I have to be careful about doing those because I can accidentally lose a day that I should be doing actual work i'm getting paid for. The flipping floppies/etc is a good background no brain activity.
During the first two weeks of quarantine, I launched a Shopify website to sell/rent home fitness equipment. It's been a great learning experience in the world of Supply Chain Manufacturing. While the site was an initial success and led to dozens of orders the first week (with no paid advertising), I hit a major roadblock that I was not expecting. My suppliers had to temporarily halt equipment manufacturing due to the emergency law that required them to start producing PPE. This led to the shortage of gym equipment nationwide. You can't even find dumbbells online.
Although my website got a lot of organic traffic and orders within the first two weeks, I was unable to fulfill most orders since manufacturing was on pause and everything was already sold out.
Since then I've continued studying SCM, and I'm also learning Python so that I can build a model to predict this kind of event in the future.
It’s hard to predict a worldwide pandemic. It’s easier, but still difficult, to predict the course of a pandemic when it first emerges. You can build a model that measures the risk of supply chain disruption vs. the cost of buying more inventory than you normally would. This could go beyond pandemics obviously.
Ah okay that makes sense. I honestly get kind of annoyed when I buy things that aren't labelled as backorders and then get told that even though I paid, they don't have stock. I'm not sure if the OP labels them as such or not
Restore an old grand piano, play that grand piano, finally learning to read notes properly.
So far so good, it's pretty good to play now, still need more action regulation. The piano had been stored on its side for years, lots of transport, water and insect damage.
Total spent: $100 for the piano, $100 to transport it, $50 to buy string steel to replace the strings that had broken. There is still some worn felt in there as well that will need replacing, mostly on the hammer rest bar and the bottom of the jack support bar. Shaping the hammers was a tricky job (they'd worn down quite a bit, to the point where the original shape was hard to determine).
Generally, people don't realise that pianos that don't get restored have something of an expiry date. I know that if it's 80 years old and has never been restored, then it's considered to be unusable. But I guess if you put in really hard work one can? Conversely, old pianos in good shape sound great. I think that's my issue with Yamaha grands. They sound soulless.
Steinway pianos for example have to be restored with Steinway parts to have resale value. I guess that's why you get such high prices for them.
> Generally, people don't realise that pianos that don't get restored have something of an expiry date.
Agreed, especially once the soundboard or pinblock are cracked.
But those are actually quite good on this particular instrument. It was simply a 'budget' grand, 135 so fairly small, made in the DDR so not the best quality (to put it mildly). The fun is in getting it to work again and a great piano to practice repair skills on, you couldn't possibly mess it up much further.
> But I guess if you put in really hard work one can?
Absolutely, but it would definitely not be economical, then you'd have to work on a more valuable instrument.
> Conversely, old pianos in good shape sound great. I think that's my issue with Yamaha grands. They sound soulless.
I'm not good enough to distinguish from a technically good grand and one that sounds 'great', this one actually sounds a lot better than it's $100 price tag would lead you to believe, in fact it sounds a lot better than my $1500 digital one, and it's in many ways much more fun to play.
> Steinway pianos for example have to be restored with Steinway parts to have resale value. I guess that's why you get such high prices for them.
Steinway pianos are valuable because they are sought after, not because each and every one of them is great. I've seen really crappy Steinways sold for their weight in gold.
Bosendorfer is very good too, not nearly at the price of a Steinway, Pleyel has some really nice instruments (but those are getting much older now), Fazioli, Kawai and many others. The history of a piano is about as good as the trees from which its parts have been cut and with wood being a natural product that puts a lot of variability in at the core.
That's why the really good brands pay a premium for the highest grades of wood, that's the easiest way to make a huge difference in quality.
Stellenbosch University has Bosendorfers in the conservatory. They are great!
I also almost had the opportunity to buy a Pleyel for cheap, but I think a dealer bought it straight away after it was posted.
If I had that kind of money I would go for a Fazioli these days. The story behind it and the niche of an Italian piano is just too enticing. I would go there and see the whole thing though. And of course if they don't play well with my style then... Well, then one always has the classic brands to consider. The other awesome piano is the Bosendorfer with the extra lower octave. Bosendorfer is actually now owned by Yamaha.
Definitely. Lots of water damage though, quite a few of them have been attacked by rust and it is hard to remove the rust without significantly weakening the strings. Endless patience. Today I set all the hammers so the una corda pedal works as intended, not that I use it but I felt it looked like crap with all those irregular spacings. This instrument has had a very rough life. I should have made 'before' and 'after' pictures. It's a cheap DDR product, even so it just hurt to see it in that shape. It's a 'Zimmermann' they have a bed reputation (deservedly so, the action really is poorly manufactured) but with a lot of tweaking you can get it to work quite well, definitely above the level that I'm at in playing so that is good enough.
Real-time board games over webRTC video chat. I have chess, checkers, and a scrabble clone.
I've passed it around to friends and to some low traffic forums. The rendering library is a bit heavy for a board game (it makes my laptop's fan spin :)) so I'm fixing that before I share it more widely
This is exactly what I was thinking of building, except with newer games like Spyfall, Codenames and Avalon! Would love to see those games on your site, or help build them if I can.
We should talk. The architecture is abstracted to make it easy to add any turn-based game onto it. Or at least that's the hope :). I'll send you an email.
Since last fall, I've been renovating a 100 year old apartment / condo. Completely gutted it, raised the flat roof that was sinking in the middle, replaced the plumbing, now levelling the floors and building the new floor plan -- months of work to go yet. The project is kind of a godsent in this pandemic; with no family or dependents I have something to do with myself. My job involves looking at a laptop screen all day, having a project with physical, tangible results is really rewarding. I'm doing it mostly solo, at first as a cost-cutting measure, now out of necessity.
I have done the same thing last year. Yes, it's a lot of work, it did take me over a year. And yes, it's extremely satisfying. I did it on a condo for Airbnb rental.
Here's the link to show what it looks like: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/plus/39954647
No it's not a shameless plug, since we're shut down right now due to the virus.
Take a look at this. It's my daughter's retelling of the whole story of this project. I think she did a great job of showing the progress. I'd probably emphasize slightly different aspects, depending on the pains the next day.
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/179140921692015...
I do all the maintenance on my car. I have learned 95% from watching other people do it on youtube. The other 5% is from forum posts and a repair manual.
As a solo-developer I’ve been nurturing an Electron app named Label LIVE. I spent most of April adding a feature to render multi-label “sheets” (think Avery/ULINE labels) as multi-page PDFs. It’s been really fun, because each label on the sheet can have unique data (from a spreadsheet, a serial number, a barcode, etc) so the end result feels ... pretty awesome.
A side-affect of all this PDF works is that my app now supports all system printers (inkjet/laser) including fancy color label printers from Epson, Primera, Afinia, etc.
Printing labels has always been a total pain, especially on Mac. My goal is to make label printing an enjoyable process for both Windows and Mac users. Check it out at https://label.live
This, and my partner is 8.99 months pregnant with our 2nd child!
I built a climbing wall at home for myself and the kids, since the bouldering gyms have closed. Its not as good as a gym, but hopefully I'll keep my some of my grip strength!
Mine is framed in 70x35mm pine, and built from formwork plywood (formply), which is 17mm thick. The holds attach with 3/8th inch bolts that go into t-nuts in the back. I still need to give the formply a bit of a sand and put a non-slip coating on it, as the holds can rotate if I've not recently tightened them.
I've been working on adding diff support to a tool I created a while back for interactive rebases in Git. It's been interesting digging into libgit2 and the Rust bindings.
The tool/utility provides an easy interface for managing the interactive rebase TODO file. It's heavily inspired by vim and I have plans to expand the functionality.
I had tried a similar tool that was written using Node.js but that seemed like overkill. After ranting about the lack of a good tool, my co-worker at the time challenged me to write it that evening after work. I added to the challenge that I would write it Rust since I had not used the language before and I had heard several good things about it. After hacking away for several hours that evening, I had a working prototype to show at work the next day. Since then the project has evolved a lot and it's gained some traction. It now has a small community behind it, which is really awesome!
I've been making sourdough bread routinely once a week. The sixth loaf, this morning, is the best yet and I'm really happy with how my familiarity with the recipe is developing. It's almost on par with the local bakery!
I have finally, after some 5 years, setup my RaspberryPi to perform a useful function for me. To validate the claims by my ISP makes about our bandwidth. It's performing a speedtest periodically and updating a Google Sheet with the results. Over time I hope to track and back up their guarantee myself! In the process I am learning about Go, Docker and Google's API. I am also increasing my knowledge of Linux. The project continues with more automation and monitoring.
I've recorded on 2 separate occasions bass lines for different bands in a simple home studio which has been put together since lockdown. I'm collaborating more with a teenage friend whom I used to record and perform with a lot many years ago.
Also, briefly: I've built my family home in Minecraft and plan on extending to some memorable landmarks...
And I hope to get round to reversing the fridge doors before the end!
I never checked, but always assumed the (ba)sh syntax highlighter had to be the most convoluted one. Shell has dozens of weird quirks and context dependent features, exceptions, whatnot, and it's still not working properly. every time I do a dist-upgrade, something about it gets fixed and something else breaks.
I was working on a side project before the quarantine. It's now my main project after I lost my job. The goal of my project is to provide an easy and fast way to create dashboards. The tool turns a JSON spec file into a dashboard. We're using React and Redwoodjs. They're fun tech stacks.
I've been drinking more coffee than usual, but still haven't perfected my French press. The internet told me it was because of non-uniform grind size as a result of my cheap grinder. So, I knocked together something that can track coffee particle size distribution using my phone camera.
This is really cool, and looks like it was a fun project to code.
Any reason why it’s not available on the play store in Canada? I’d actually be satisfied with any answer here, because it would be super interesting if there was.
I launched it a month ago. It's a tool that converts your un-used domains into something useful.
By something useful, I mean a self-running automated content aggregator with lots of bells and whistles to keep it running (e.g. membership, newsletters, ads).
I had way too many domain names that are not being used. I wanted to make some use of them without having to maintain them and spending time on it. Now I have all of my 25 un-used domains.
(Though this surely exists) I'm working on a website that would allow people to remember their pill-routine in a more interactive way. i.e., many of my friends who are on xyz medication (from multivitamins to birth control) and tend to take them on a specific schedule, tend to start ignoring their phone's native reminders app because it gets very annoying, and some still forget. On my platform (hopefully) people will be able to access their own private dashboard where they'll be able enter info, view all, and somehow let me remind them automatically if they so choose (without me actually having access to their dashboard).
Please share whatever progress you make. Now doing eldercare. I'm desperate for tools, ideas.
One huge challenge is working with people who can no longer learn. For future, I'm eager to have "futureproofed" tools, protocols, habits, skills. Embed a pill management regiment when someone reaches 60 which can serve another 20-30 years without major modification.
PS- Everyone pill minder I've tried sucks. Every pharmacy app I've tried sucks. I apologize for not having constructive feedback; maybe I'm too close to the problem.
Hi, I am working on a reminders centric product. And I think I might have a solution. Might be a naive and effective one or can be a totally useless.
Can we connect and discuss? Couldn't find your email on your profile.
This highlights an interesting opportunity? How could one create a protocol/platform that can be taught to someone now, and yet continue being used by people who can no longer learn as new 'features' are added? Thinking about some sort of 'news feed'/notifications list with simple button options that could be extended by various services to include new functionality while remaining within a consistent and learnable interface, so users wouldn't have to re-learn interfaces for each service.
This is great! One of my side projects right now is a medicine/routine/habit tracker. The goal is purely personal: I'm the primary caregiver for my father and keeping track of everything is just overwhelming.
From what I can see this space needs a lot of help and it's just going to get worse.
I've been babysitting the homestay family kids, building Lego models, playing games (Worms Armageddon, Age of Empires II, Bejeweled, Mahjong, Solitaire, Rummikub, Asteroid, Alien Force, eSheep, stressreducers), and helping set up Zoom and Google Meet calls for their school.
Tonight I had a super exciting evening, as I set up a local server for MSN messenger.
The 9 year old can type quite well already, and figured out how to change her font, while the 6 year old keeps sending me nudges, dancing pigs, and audio clips yelling "MIIIIIICROPHONE". It’s great to have a local server with no minimum age limit (unlike Facebook, GMail, etc) and no risk of creepy friend requests.
I'm working on a kind of human-curated recommendation engine for movies.
As a movie buff, I'm often frustrated by the film recommendations apps that return results too out of context for me. I also find them quite depressing, they're often nothing more than echo chambers that favor the same movies again and again.
Actually, I didn't become a movie buff with tools like this but with watching the movies liked by the directors of my favorite films.
For instance: Pulp Fiction -> Quentin Tarantino -> Bande à part -> Jean-Luc Godard -> Robert Bresson -> ...
In addition to giving you some ideas about films that you could like, this helps you to better see the big picture (no pun intended). You learn about the important movie periods and movements (French New Wave, Italian neorealism, New Hollywood...), you develop a more serious approach to film, and you can live these mind-blowing moments when you notice similarities between two movies done 50 years apart and that looked at first glance totally different.
I already created the engine (which is giving good results for my profile! It recommends me movies that I never thought of). The challenge was mostly to found all the data required by the engine.
Now, I must admit I'm procrastinating a little bit for developing the actual web app!
(and thank you everyone for your messages, your projects are awesome!)
My friends and coworkers have been playing a White Elephant game with movie titles—everyone puts in a movie title, we exchange them with White Elephant rules, then you have to go watch the movie you end up with. You end up with a movie you wouldn’t have otherwise watched, and you have people you can talk about the movie with. Even if you end up with a really bad film, it can be a lot of fun.
I’ve been meaning to turn it into an app to streamline gameplay (we just manage it with spreadsheets), but I’m really dragging my feet on it.
Awesome! I did a similar thing as my quarantine side project! It's https://couchmoney.tv
Quite a few years ago, I wrote a boardgame recommendation engine for reddit (/r/boardgamerecommender), and when the quarantine hit, I was watching movies and really scraping the bottom of the barrel with the recommendations I was getting (both automated and manual), so I made couchmoney.
I haven't done much with it - have a few hundred users, but I'm planning on keeping it going under the radar because it's transformed how I personally watch movies. I now have close to 200 couchmoney dynamic lists ("1980s Action", "Obscure Horror Comedies" etc) that update every time I watch a movie and are based on real people's tastes.
The engine isn't perfect but it's adapted from the board game thing, which I've been tinkering with for a long time now.
More than happy to help you if you hit issues or want to bounce ideas ... I spend a lot of time thinking about recommendations!
The recommender morphed into my latest quarantine side project, which is a "name that movie" game designed to be played over zoom. It's still super early (and basically only works on Chrome right now) but if you like movies, you may like that. It's at https://couchmoneytrivia.tv
Awesome!
All the reactions motivate me to finish at least a first version of my project, so I'm going to do it and then I'll be glad to share it with you! I'm going to try your trivia game too :)
Pretty cool idea. I get a lot of movie recommendations from Criterion closet videos where filmmakers come and pick out movies to take. Barry Jenkins' video got me to watch the Apu Trilogy for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7HLpe65fHY
Is your engine published on a website or otherwise open source? One good source would be letterboxed, they already have human curated lists. An example list is one where the person curated all movies that use high saturation/good color grading.
For my movie recommender project, I wanted to support Letterboxd but they didn't respond to any of my emails (they have a closed API). So for now I only support Trakt. If anyone knows how to get onto the Letterboxd API please let me know!
Ideally, yes, to avoid to force the user to enter manually the films he likes... (or, like simiansays did, proposing an integration with another website)
Hi! I would not consider myself a movie buff but I really enjoy watching movies and your project sounds very interesting. I am a frontend dev, and I would very much like to contribute to your web app. If you are interested, please shoot me an email at azatsdev@gmail.com.
Thanks a lot moonfleet! Actually the reactions motivated me to complete at least a first version. I'm not a good frontend dev but the UI is important in what I want to do so I'm going to developing myself for now. But I'm keeping your email, in case I'd want to upgrade the UI/UX!
I am a big time movie buff and curious about how you tackle the recommender system problem. Especially about defining domain specific groupa. Is it hosted somewhere on the GitHub?
I'm creating (and just soft-launched!) a micro-learning site called smalltuts: https://smalltuts.com/
The concept is simple: If twitter + youtube had a baby for learning.
An interesting side effect: I've personally had a hard time getting started with writing, and ever since I've launched smalltuts, I've created a new course almost every day.
I really like the concept! The "mark as done" really helps track things. Would've personally preferred if the items collapsed as you marked them as complete.
As one of the examples show this is the perfect way to convey installation / setup guides!
I wrote a django-crispy-forms template pack for the GOV.UK Design
System. I was working on a project for Public Health England when the
project got put on hold because of the lock-down and this was an itch that needed scratching. Hopefully this is going to speed things up when the
project resumes.
I created this app for my daughter to help her get better at math. It's still a work in progress, but I thought I'd share it here to get some initial feedback. https://tafels.app
Really nice. Your daughter love using it? Feedback: I would make background color of buttons with answers slightly lighter to make text easier to read.
Shaking up the JavaScript build tool ecosystem with https://github.com/evanw/esbuild, a bundler and minifier that's 10x-100x faster than industry-standard ones (Webpack/Rollup/Parcel).
I re-created my personal website trying to build a compelling web experience that works without JavaScript and any third parties. With so much of an emphasis on front-end frameworks and JavaScript runtimes, I wanted to try to get back to basics... just for fun.
https://insightfulinteraction.com/
People often insist that JS is necessary for interactivity, and it really, really isn't. You can create interactive web experiences without JS, and just add sprinkles of it when it makes sense.
"Basics" are more than enough for the vast majority of web content.
Thank you!
I agree -- most sites on the web are just content and there's no reason to have excessive JavaScript or any reason why the page can't be perfectly functional without it.
Some people call it 'The Website Obesity Crisis'.
I was doing weekly groceries since last summer and had partially automated the process of aggregating the ingredients into one grocery list already.
When the social distancing started I figured maybe others would find this tool useful, so I spent a couple of days building a usable interface and account creation features and told some friends on Facebook. Nobody, besides me and my girlfriend, ended up really using it, but it was a nice exercise nonetheless ;).
Thanks! As of now, no, but I'm thinking about adding such functionality with a chrome extension maybe, not sure yet if that really works out or if I get round to it though. But its currently my biggest bottleneck in my own workflow so it may just get there ;).
My ambition is to plan out for 3 months or so and then to be able to split up the groceries and order all the non-expiry stuff once from a grocery delivery shop and have a weekly grocery list to take to a bio shop.
I made a national organization (AARP) change course and issue corrections regarding their Coronavirus volunteer program with a single blog post on Medium. (They had been sending members to an open, Google spreadsheet where their info was public). https://medium.com/@doncarlitos/maintaining-privacy-while-vo...
I still have my day job (working from home), so I haven't had too much time to pursue side projects, but I've been doing a lot of reading lately on Nintendo 64 internals (esp. around the RCP and the microcode thereof) and homebrew, and it's got my head ticking. If all goes well I should be getting an EverDrive-64 X7¹ in the mail in a couple weeks, which will be a boon for (hopefully) eventually putting all that reading into practice. No practical benefit to this per se, but it does seem to be an interesting potential foray into embedded programming, which has always been a gap in my knowledge that I've wanted to fill.
I've also been on-and-off learning Zig, both in support of the above (Zig on the N64 seems to be uncharted territory that I'd love to help explore) and in support of development of a Tcl-like programming/scripting/config language (iterating on my learnings from an earlier project of mine² implementing such a language on top of Erlang/OTP); the latter's something that's been bouncing around in my head for a few years now, and I feel like I'm at the point where I'm ready to start bouncing those ideas into an Emacs buffer, lol (especially now that I've found what seems to be the right host language in which to implement it).
EDIT: oh, and early into quarantine I did submit my first ever patch to wine-staging³ (with quite a bit of help from a couple others, including one of the wine-staging maintainers) to fix a mouse cursor/movement bug in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord under Wine/Proton. It's a small patch, but it's my patch nonetheless, and it's a surreal and proud feeling to see my name in the commits for software I use almost daily. It's also helped demystify Wine a bit for me, and I look forward to continuing to do my part to make it better.
As someone doing mostly C development at work I've really come to enjoy Zig in my side projects at home. At work we are moving a lot of newer development to Rust, which makes sense in terms of safety, the speed we want from C and "modernising"/becoming more attractive as an employer. However, when I'm doing projects for my own amusement at home I want something that doesn't feel like work, and getting into Zig and have something working took me no time. It's so easy to interface with C libraries that I can spin up most things with existing C libraries for the things Zig doesn't already provide itself.
Yep, exactly. I was originally pretty excited about Rust, but I feel like it biases toward large highly-structured projects like C++ does, making it a bit daunting for personal projects. Just a bit too professional for something I'm hacking together over a weekend, lol. Zig feels like it's easier to wrap my head around, and seems optimized for the "pet project" use case.
I also feel like learning Zig is helping me better understand C. I probably wouldn't have been able to contribute much to that Wine patch if Zig hadn't already gotten me more comfortable with pointers, statically-allocated variables, and such in a reasonably-safe way (having prior experience with Perl did help a little bit for pointers, since referencing and dereferencing variables is pretty common in Perl codebases, but it always felt a bit detached from what the machine was actually doing behind the scenes).
Email sent (expect one from northrup at (my HN username) dot us).
Reminds me that Zigler's yet another reason why I've been wanting to learn Zig; I usually go with ports over NIFs, but should that ever change I'd definitely rather be doing it in Zig than in C (or Rust, as similarly-neat as Rustler may be). So thanks, and keep up the good work!
I'm an ex-military now furloughed airline pilot working on a flight planning tool to save trying to spot the needle in the haystack that is the current NOtice To AirMen system.
I created https://fruitionsite.com, a free, open source toolkit for building websites with Notion. You get pretty URL slugs, custom domain, and a whole bunch of other features.
I hacked it together in a weekend, put up the marketing site (using Fruition, oh so meta) and shared it in Notion's Facebook group and subreddit, without any expectations that it would go anywhere.
The response has been incredible. 11000 people have checked it out since. It ended up on the Product Hunt newsletter [1]. People are making YouTube videos [2] about it. Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks [3] shared it too.
The biggest lesson for me was just launch it. There were many more things I wanted to add. But I decided to share it publicly before it was perfect. Now I have users who can give me real feedback rather than me pretending I know what people want.
I created https://www.pullchecklist.com, a Github tool that surfaces contextually relevant checklists for Pull Requests. I built it to scratch an itch of a common problem at work. Some of the member of my team were tired of manually checking Github checklists because they were not relevant to the PR they were reviewing. This tool layers conditional logic on top of Github's checklist functionality.
Compared to EF, you author your projections in a sandbox where you can get familiar with your data as you build up your projection. Compared to stored procs, your queries are versioned and distributed with the app. Compared to Dapper and ADO, your SQL lives in a real environment and you have zero mappings to maintain. This ought to change the world, no?
I've setup a personal matrix[1]-instance, with the relevant bridges for almost all communications-platforms I use. Only exception is Signal, which ironically is open-source, but still somehow un-integratable.
Being able to access all my things, consistently in the same app, across devices, machines and networks is super-neat, and Riot[2] is a really smooth Matrix-client, on mobile, web and desktop.
This is without a doubt the most productive spare-time hacking I've done in a good while!
I had the synapse-instance, plus VoIP, irc-bridges, whatsapp and facebook bridges all up in about one day.
The Signal bridge? It's an absolute train-wreck to setup, and after spending a good whole weekend++ getting everything building...
Then I found out that the "pair" command never completes. By random I later found out that it only works for the other users which has an Android phone. Seemingly it doesn't work if you use an iPhone to pair up, but that's not documented anywhere either.
I find it particularly interesting comparing that to the bridges for other proprietary IM-systems (facebook, whatsapp), because you would expect those to perform worse (being closed, need reverse-engineering, etc), but no. They are seamless to setup, while open-sourcey hero "Signal" is impossible to create an integration against.
I used to learn web development after work, but homeschooling my kids doesn't leave me time for that anymore.
I'm curious how devs with kids at home manage the current situation. The constant multitasking stresses me a lot, I feel incapable of doing anything tech-related that would involve deep focus.
Does cleaning up the flat count as side project :D?
I have a kindergartener and left my job at the end of March to volunteer on COVID efforts. Now, a month and a half into it, I work from ~6a-12p ET, then take over homeschooling while my wife works from 1-6p. When working, we're in the attic and not to be disturbed, and we keep pretty strict about that.
I've always said that working parents know how to make the most of their 8-hour days in the office, and that's only been amplified. In general, I'm pedal-to-the-metal for my 5-6 hours a day, and then have our family lunch hour to recover before the not-really-relaxing homeschooling begins. We'll get a spot of work in most evenings, half-an-hour of TV, and then it's to bed to start it again the next day.
As for my wife and I, we're both mostly exhausted and guilty – guilty that we're not getting more done at work (even though I'm volunteering!), not doing a better job on homeschooling, etc.
When it's time to get a new job on my end, I'm really nervous about how it's going to go. I'd typically be doing 10-plus-hour days as I ramp up on new teams and material, but that's just impossible these days. In a normal world, I had lots of arguments for why a business should want to hire working parents, but right now it's really tough to justify.
My kid is great, and certainly not a "tough" child by any real measure, but still... Camps and schools can't open up soon enough.
We're fortunate we both still have jobs and can work from home, but doing so full-time while caring for a demanding 3yo, homeschooling an inquisitive 8yo with ADHD and cooking/ cleaning/ washing/ housework; we feel like incompetent plate-spinners. We too take it in shifts, up at 6am, to bed gone midnight.
I've never felt more knackered or guilty. Guilty neither of our kids (nor our employer) get the best of us. Guilty at feeling hard done by when we're not really: we've friends who've lost their livelihood and know health workers are risking their lives. We know it ends, but man... not soon enough.
I feel you. I felt so guilty I had to clear this up with my boss. Thankfully it turned out they are pretty understanding and this won't go in any performance review of anyone in this situation (both parents work standard office hours, kid at home, etc). IF the business survives the pandemic and lockdown, that is.
Well, I'm not a teacher (I lead a USDR team), but they really do. When restrictions started, my wife and I set up twice-daily Zooms for our son's class while the schools figured out what to do. It was exhausting, but eventually our kid's teacher started joining them and now has taken them over. She also conducts a dozen "small group" sessions throughout the week, and juggles the wildness and lack of attention of kindergarteners with the responsibility of raising her own newborn.
It's cray for everyone, just in different shapes and sizes.
USDR is the U.S. Digital Response[0] – a band of volunteers (over 5000 folks have volunteered, maybe a few hundred are active), mostly technologists, who are working pro-bono on behalf of state, city, county, and local governments across the US to help improve COVID response and recovery efforts.
My team is a couple dozen folks who typically dive into issues relating to internal challenges governments have wrangling their data into shape so they can make decisions. We've worked with NYC on their PPE crisis, Pennsylvania on hospital capacity tracking, Oakland on homeless encampments, and several others. Sometimes it's a quick python script to automate data ingestion, other times it's a complete web app.
In our case, most of it is private/internal, so it's not sexy work, but it really feels like we're having an impact.
I have a full time job that has moved to remote and my spouse is on Zoom calls most of the day for work. The only “side project” I have time for is managing my kids’ remote learning. They are 7 and 9 yrs old. There are so many links and logins and forms and downloads and uploads. I’ve learned. Lot about how Google Classrooms could be redesigned to improve independence of younger learners. Candidly, this is very difficult and my mental health is taking a serious hit.
Well, I don't know the policy of your company, but at mine we've been encouraged to take some days if possible.
Not only for mental health, but also to avoid that everyone take time off at the same time. On another hand we have 30+ days per year, I guess it's a different story if you only have 20 days or less.
I can take time off and I did last week. However, I ended up just doing pretty much the same thing as when I was working, so it was a waste. What I really need is some time completely to myself, just sitting outside or something. It's my most precious resource right now and very hard to come by.
I don't think they are, in most cases. I worked from home in the before time, so in theory not much has changed. In practice I have three kids, and it's a struggle just to maintain my baseline productivity.
In a way this is a relief to hear. I keep reading up on the excess productivity of others, while I'm pulling my hair out trying to manage normal work and my kids when on paper nothing much has changed given that I was WFH before this. It sucks, but I'm glad I'm not alone.
One of the best things I heard from my company's CEO when they moved everyone over to WFH was 'your productivity is going to go down. It just is. It doesn't matter if you were fully WFH before, it's going to go down. And that's ok. And I've told your managers to expect it, and to not let you stress over it.'
Then leadership modified the metrics that bonuses are calculated on, so that the slowdown wouldn't affect our ability to get them.
Same here. I had to clear this situation up with my boss, my stress levels are going through the roof and I just can't get things done (and every time I get "in the zone", I hear a thud and my baby has hurt herself again).
Thankfully it turns out the bosses understand this situation and expect a massive productivity decline. I feel I've taken a load off my chest by bringing it up.
Still feeling stressed, and of course, my company may tank, making the whole issue moot. I'm not sure I'm up for interviewing with the current situation, either...
My last real side project halted when my second kid was born almost two years ago. I likely won’t have time or energy to do another one for another two years, regardless of quarantine status.
Young kids are an 80 hour per week job. The only way anyone has time for paying work normally is school, daycare/relatives, or one partner dedicated to child-raising. Even for the non-child-caring parent the kids fill in the remaining 30-40 hours after the "real" job and commute. I don't think most people have much left after being switched "on" 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, week after week.
How does anyone get stuff done beyond the requisite 40, with kids? Two proven strategies: 1) ignore the kids a lot, 2) hire help. That's what all those famous old guys who discovered all kinds of cool stuff or wrote amazing literature or philosophized or whatever, while also having kids, did. Probably there are super-humans out there who manage without doing those things, but I'm not convinced they're common enough to count on or to give much consideration. Nb some people will hire help but not really want to tell people they have—don't assume someone blogging about raising kids while doing 100 other things, or crushing it at work, hasn't hired help just because they don't mention it. Decent odds they have.
This is likely not the right answer. A lot of those "famous people" are horrible parents. Makes you wonder why they chose to have kids to begin with...
I feel I have the grasp of the material but I cannot teach them about it. So things like long division are done with minimal explanation. I think I did okay with multidigit multiplication (ab * xy). In general, I feel the time I have spent explaining stuff to her is insufficient.
Today she said she does not know how to write an essay. I kinda fudged it for the case in front of her (Intro, your points, an opposing point or two, conclusion). I think there is a better structure in teaching writing 'essays' - I just dont know how to teach that.
The "5 paragraph essay" (intro, 3 points, conclusion) is basically what you outlined but without the opposing points section, which sound valuable to include.
I've had to put my side gig (building guitars) on hold. My wife and I both have day jobs, and we have a two year old. We take turns working and parenting, and it's not unusual for one or both of us to be up till 2 AM finishing work.
I'm genuinely happy for everyone who has planted a new garden, taken up a new hobby, started a new software project, etc. For those of us who can't take our kids to daycare or school right now, though, quarantine has meant less time to do the things we already had to do.
You're not alone. And yes, cleaning up counts as a side project.
Deep focus is really difficult. Without a checklist it's hard to get anything done, and there are a number of interruptions.
As for learning / focus - typically that happens after they're in bed, and the time gets eaten from sleep, but I haven't been able to dig into anything deeper than a Raspberry Pi tinkering project.
My hobby used to be painting collectible miniatures (you know, Warhammer and the like) but since the lockdown I'm barely able to work, let alone spend time on hobbies. My baby takes all my spare time.
> I'm curious how devs with kids at home manage the current situation
I manage the situation by stressing a lot and panicking. Hope that helps!
Timebox your side project learning when the kids are asleep. (Even 30 mins a day adds up). Be sure to communicate with your significant other / spouse what desires are for this time and be clear about your time boundaries. Make sure you end when you say you're going to and reconnect with your spouse.
I've been worked for a while now on an new Supervisor / Init system written in Rust: https://github.com/FedericoPonzi/horust/
Learnt a lot in the process and there are so much things still to do! Feel free to drop me a message if you're interested in contributing, curious or just to say hi :)
After falling in love with the Destroy All Software style of genuinely advanced, all-encompassing programming screencasts, I started a YouTube channel with my own twist on the theme: Screencasts situated inside a decade-old, profitable, production web app, ones that emphasize actual workflow.
I've been an indie-hacker for 10 years so have seen the effects of my programming decisions over the same period. I've seen how fads come and go, sometimes wreaking havoc. I've also seen how coding decisions affect business (such as strategies to transform data into seo at scales of 10k+ items). I've seen how to keep something running day-and-night as if your livelihood depended on it - since it very much does.
For fun I took up the tenor ukulele. Compared to any other instrument I've tried, it's got a much kinder learning curve. You can sound alright playing four-chord rock and pop songs in easier keys like C major after a month.
I got an iPad and the pencil and I'm drawing a lot. It's super relaxing and fun to see the finished product. Plus, this is my first time really doing digital art so I'm blown away by how sophisticated the tooling is.
This might look familiar to anyone who has seen this set of unity tutorials. I watched the first ~6 back to back and then attempted to rebuild a version of it all from memory.
I'm also working on an article about software correctness, summarizing my experience working on infrastructure software at Google for about 13 years. It's very incomplete and I'll probably end up restructuring it significantly (not very happy with the current logical structure). I only started working on this two or three weeks ago (as a side project), so I'm satisfied with the progress I've been able to make: https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/software-corre...
I'm also working on other similar articles on other topics (Bitcoin, Stoicism, Bauhaus), but those are even less complete.
I started practicing Zettelkasten recently, using The Archive[1].
I already had a pretty large collection of less-structured notes from nvALT, and I love how the new "rules" really help to shape my new notes. I'm converting old notes as I have the time and need.
I was initially skeptical of the idea of timestamping notes in the filename, but I find it counterintuitively useful, and The Archive has really good support for it w/ the Cmd-U shortcut. The Archive also has multiple tabs, which help immensely over nvALT's single pane.
Thank you for mentioning this - on the surface - rather obscure concept, that personally i have never come across in education.
After understanding it better it seems to be very close to the way the internet and hyperlinks work, it also reminds me of historian James Burke Connections school of understanding history.
I have just installed the wiki plugin in Sublime and will try to transition from my folders with extremely long tagged txt's that i search for, and instead go for the hyperlink method.
I have always thought that - western thought at least - works as a node system where the essence lies in the constellations, the extrapolations, and the weird and wonderful stuff happening between nodes of information, in how they are arranged and how they are traversed - something i have struggled with because my thoughts are rarely looked at again, ends up in piles of never revisited bookmarks and is redone instead of built upon.
I am already pretty exited about rearranging my thoughts / todo's / plans in this new way.
I started taking a few bites out of a job shop scheduling solution that's been in the back of my mind for ages.
I tend to end up doing general geek stuff for small manufacturing businesses. At a certain point they always ask about scheduling automation because their one person who runs the shop can't keep track of everything any more. The existing scheduling solutions are either too far down the rabbit hole of job-shop-scheduling yak shaving to fit or attached to an ERP that's out of their price range for a while.
In this case scheduling automation doesn't have to be perfect. It shouldn't be, it's a waste of time. These users haven't grown into habits that fit an optimized solution; their manufacturing data has been treated as an arcane nuisance because it hasn't provided benefits yet. All they need is something basic to get them started on the way to better habits and improving their data while improving scheduling. I don't know how far I'll get, but it's cathartic and educational to work on for now.
I've seen women posting on solo travelling facebook groups their current or next location and PM each other, especially in non-english language groups.
With the app, you would receive a notification when a new traveller (speaking your native tongue or not) is close using geolocation, then you check their facebook profile and message them (via messenger).
No need to display the app: you just wait for the notifications (which frequency can be changed). This is my idea for solving the egg & chicken problem, so obviously the app doesn't display ads (and is free).
I'm sorry that my mind is in the gutter but the email reads "Solo Fap" to me, you may want to consider changing it because there are probably plenty of other lonely 20-somethings whose minds are also in the gutter
this is my first smoker. i had no idea what i was even getting when i ordered a traeger. a pal works there and i moved into a place with a lot of space and got me half off the Ironwood 650. I love it and would really recommend a pellet grill to start. It's _SO_ easy. you set the temp on the grill, forget it, and measure the temp of the meat.
https://istqb-glossary.page - I got frustrated with the official ISTQB glossary page, so I made my own. Scraped their data via (terrible, terrible) search API, published it all as a hugo page. Nothing spectacular, but it serves a purpose. You can link to a specific term with relative ease, see available translations and synonyms, and if I come around to adding extra content (like youtube videos or articles explaining concept - see https://istqb-glossary.page/boundary-value-analysis/), then the page will morph into place for learning more about testing concepts - the glossary itself might be a little... dry.
All contributions are welcome, however we're working 2 fulltime jobs and care for a 3 yo in lockdown, so time to work on this project is a luxury.
I worked on a bash script that downloads all of Slack messages to my local computer. I have a few workspaces (some community workspaces) where I don't have admin permissions and a few free tier workspaces where messages are limited to 10K. I use this script to download chat messages to my computer everyday so I can grep them later at any time.
Built a simple web app for my girlfriend and I to "rate" our dates and add photos. That way we can look back and have a nice digitized archive of time we spent with each other.
Sounds dumb but could be nice one day in the future to be able to look back at it. Also wrote it in Rust so I'm learning a new language while I'm at it.
I'm working on an app that tracks errors in your applications. Currently, it supports NodeJS servers and JS frontends. It reports detailed information about the error like console logs, code snippets, stacktrace, occurrences with timestamps, previous user interactions and custom data. In addition, it allows you to track data about your websites visitors such as page views, unique visitors, sessions, time on page, referrers and device data. It's all done in a very transparent manner with as little data as possible. It's written in Go and React and is completely open-source and can easily hosted by yourself.
I installed Blender and started learning to do simple 3D modelling. Really satisfying to get things right, and also frustrating in an almost funny way, it feels like when I started out programming "I just wanna put a button here, how hard can it be!?!?".
A plus side these days is that it takes enormous amounts of time. For people interested in starting out: My 2019 13" MBP is fast enough for it to be fun, at least for now. So you don't need to worry too much about GPU performance.
I go through phases of investing time in Blender & creating 3D renders. Plan is to create a CG 3 panel type comic. I've always wanted to do this and even though working from home, there's more time in day due to no commute. Love all the changes in 2.8 and enjoy learning the tool as much as I do creating with it.
Up to 2,000 subscribers now which is very motivating! I feel like there is a lot of demand for this information, but there is a shortage of people who are sharing how to implement trading systems with Python. So I'm teaching myself and sharing on YouTube as I learn.
Hypothesis: As many of us work from home, there are several different things we all do. Be it cooking, hobbies, writing etc. WFH Cave is a place to share your projects and help inspire each other. I currently have around 30 users, mostly friends and family.
Feedback that would help - what is that would stick here. Currently it feels like a normal photo sharing site. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
There were a lot of layoffs recently, so I wanted to do whatever I can to help my fellow engineers. I unfortunately can't help with referrals, but what I can do is share my experience and knowledge. I love Dynamic Programming and decided to record a YouTube course [1] explaining the topic as simple as possible (ELI5).
A lot of people struggle with DP and if you are one of those, feel free to subscribe. I release new videos every Sunday.
Also, since I'm not an an experienced YouTuber and English is my second language, feedback is a massive motivator for me. So, if you have any feedback to share, please, let me know what needs to be improved and I'll make sure to work on it.
Working on a simple 3D game engine. Not going for some advanced rendering techniques, just want to have a map you can walk around. Have implemented the map loading (map from Unity Asset Store) some basic postprocessing effects, sky and skeletal animation so that I can have people walking around.
Using D and OpenGL. Might rewrite it to WebGPU in the future when it gets more stable.
Operating under the codename Portobello for now but friends and family don't like the name. The landing page is atrocious, but the actual app functionality is nearing an MVP.
I guess the big question for me is do I make it realtime for the launch. The handshake for swapping keys and allowing access to a board/organisation currently happens via HTTP polling, but that's not such a nice experience. Currently the whole thing is hosted on Netlify so moving to websockets would require me to set up another service somewhere, not sure if it's worth it before I validate my idea.
I'm going to do an official launch on Hacker News within the next couple of weeks. Still a lot to do as you'll see.
Yeah... I'm aware. My list of things to do is extensive and over the last week I committed to a PoC of the app, which is now done. Time to clean up the landing page
My girlfriend (Spanish teacher) and I are in full lockdown atm (Colombia), so we started a blog project: https://triplechili.com. The idea is to find interesting content that's only available in English, and translate it to make it available in Spanish, while at the same time providing some tools for language learners. This came out of my own efforts to find content in both languages to help me learn Spanish. So we display posts in both languages and if you click on a sentence it highlights the same sentence in the other language. Right now it's just the boilerplate next.js + strapi (headless cms) that I found, but we're in the process of coming up with a proper design.
I’ve been working on Flux, a platform to deploy and host deep learning models in production.
Instead of renting a GPU instance and setting up a Flask web server, you use git to push your trained model to Flux with some configuration and get back an http endpoint.
For example, you set that your input is the url to an image, and that your output should be the top classification and its likelihood, and that your model is in pytorch.
For example if you have a classifier for dog breeds you:
Make a POST to fluxdeploy.com/username/dog-classifier
with json { “url”: “...” }
And get back { “klass”: “Great Dane”, “probability”: 0.937373 }
No need to do your own devops, Flux will scale for you. And it’s priced per-request and cheaper than hosting your own web server. Flux also deals with versioning and dependencies.
It was originally called Astra, which ended up having even more conflicts.
I use f.lux and love it. Hoping mine is different enough to not confuse. Funny enough, I actually thought it was “f dot lux” and was conceptual thinking of it like “function dot light”
I'm working on website that aggregates Twitter feeds of your political representatives based on your location, starting from your city council, mayor through the president. This is helpful to see what they're saying and for any local updates regarding COVID or otherwise.
I've been working on a language learning app for the last year and a half, and quarantine time has definitely given me even more bandwidth to work on it. Been a source of real pleasure these last couple of months, actually.
The app itself is a bit of a different take on the problem space than many of the other well-known offerings in the market. iOS only for now, SwiftUI, and built around enabling "Compelling & Comprehensible Input"-based language acquisition using video, audio, and text you've supplied yourself.
Interestingly - when I started the project I reckoned it would be about 2 years to shipping something useful, which would mean about Q3/Q4 2020. I'm starting to think that estimate was, shockingly, about right.
I made this for my better half (she's is learning Japanese.) Point camera to object, app would read out detected object in your language of choice. https://travelshoppingbuddy.com/
More seriously, I'm trying to get in the habit of not talking about any side project I've not shipped yet, since when I "announce" them in advance I end up not shipping anything. Turns out this might actually have a basis in science, as recent studies allege that the brain "discharges" some energy/motivation when one talks about future plans.
My theory is that when we talk or in some cases even think about future plans, it gives us a sense of acomplishment before having done anything. Then we keep doing it because falling in love with an idea is easier than putting in the work to do it. And before you know it it's been a year and you're still just talking about it.
I read that too some time ago. I understood that once you announce your project, you get some of the social credit for it. This "advance credit" diminishes the return on actually putting down the work, which also tends to become more tedious towards the end of the project.
I observed this with myself: many years ago I was planning to write a novel. I had already sketched out the plot etc., and of course told my friends a family about it. For about half a year, they kept asking me about the progress. In retrospect, I quite enjoyed being "an author" in their eyes. It seems I did benefit from announcing my project without actually ever finishing it, which may very well have lowered my motivation to pull through with it. Anecdotically QED, I guess...
I tend to agree. When you've announced your project you feel like a weight has been lifted and you got something done. Then you go do something else. Better to announce your success rather than your plans. This is true for life in general, imo.
I used to do this, but I've found that having a little bit of social accountability helps more than having absolutely zero. I like to play mysterious and make small morsels of what I work on public as time goes on
Interestingly, I don't find social accountability a good motivator. It motivates me to continue, but it stresses me out as well, and when I put the two together I don't come out motivated.
I'm fairly sure i remember this from Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. Telling people your grand plans, gives you a chemical reward and actually reduces your chances of doing it
As an iOS developer I learned react! Then I learned about gastbyJS and now I’m working on making a simple website for a startup/business.
By far the hardest thing for me to grasp has been CSS, it’s just so weird and feels so un natural at some points. There are so many ways to do the same thing, which feels a little overwhelming. Also in awe of grid layouts, which I just learned about so at least that’s a good thing!
Still a work in progress, but https://www.govtrades.com as a site to easily view stock returns of senators. The goal is to increase transparency of trades and accountability in policymaking as its becoming clearer that senators still leverage non-public information in trading and may be swayed in policymaking based on stocks they own.
There is a toggle for the S&P500 you can select, but definitely agree that this should show up as a default to make it clear.
One thing we've noticed is that most senators don't beat the S&P500, but the main reason seems to be that they simply have less risky portfolios (e.g. a lot of bond ETFs)
A great feature to add would be a weekly email, featuring the trades of the top performing senators over long term time horizons. That way users could copy their trades on the presumption it is either insider trading or expert advice.
Thanks for the suggestion, we're planning on starting that up soon. Give the newsletter a subscribe if you'd like to receive updates/summaries as soon as they start: https://www.govtrades.com/subscribe
There was another reply in this thread working on something similar; I'm sorry that I don't remember what it was, or where to find it in this haystack, but you might be able to dig it up if you're curious.
Totally, that should be up within the next couple days. You can check out the methodology section for more details, but the data comes from public disclosures mandated by the STOCK Act (and Yahoo Finance for stock prices).
You might feel even worse when you learn that she's faced continued losses since the Dotcom bubble. Almost all her stock holdings are of RealNetworks, a company she worked for in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Cantwell
I'm building TidyCloud. It's a toolset on top of common cloud storage drives to provide cross platform search, duplicate identification, security risk identification and usage statistics/analytics across your files stored in the cloud
Exactly why I made it for a 72-hour gamejam. This is still a very, very early prototype of a game, but I hope to put a little bit of time each week until it becomes awesome.
Also, thanks for the words of encouragement, they mean the world to me!
I'm working on a programmable tooltip on Mac OS X (https://github.com/tanin47/tip), as in you can write your own script (ruby/python/bash) to provide tooltip items.
It's my first real app on Mac OS X. I started the app before the covid crisis though.
But these days I have so much time to iterate on it...
I’m an Actuary who is trying to encourage other actuaries to bring more computer science concepts into their work. I created some dashboards in d3.js to illustrate some of the tougher actuarial concepts and had a lot of positive feedback on LinkedIn.
Mine is pretty vanilla; I built a home server for development/media. It's been probably 13 years since I built a computer so the experience of researching parts, etc was fun. My wife appreciates it's almost totally silent :)
It's been a great project so far; using it to learn Prometheus, pick up more Go development, host my own NextCloud, and run Plex and a Minecraft server.
One friend had the idea of playing bingo using video chat programs, so I built http://bingofor.fun, a simple page which generate Bingo Cards for free. The host of the game has to generate a new game, and then he can generate as many cards as he want. He can also share the game code with the players to generate their own cards. Every card has it's own ID for validation and everything expires after 8 days.
The cards are print friendly for the classic players and for the new generation, the view card page implements simple mechanics to mark the numbers during the game.
I made a clone of YikYak because I thought that would be a good idea For people in lockdown.
After almost finishing it (only few bugs left) I decided to not bother trying to release it. Like most projects my initial enthusiasm went out the window once I got something working. It’s so ripe for abuse too that it would probably make people feel worse about themselves rather than better. I always sort of knew this but the enthusiasm for the better of me.
I’m instead going to open source all the parts of it (the web app, the sql to recreate the dB, the mobile app, and the API) as that probably has more impact.
Made an app that lets me create a grocery list that can check supply at Target. Also sorts the stuff by location. Saves me time knowing they are out of stuff and where stuff is. Want to create background notification for when something is in stock.
Wanted to build something totally cross platform. That and it was way easier just using material components than green Field designing. I'm not much of a designer.
Building:
- a native iOS personal finance app while learning Swift/Xcode/UX
- Backed by two REST API services (one is auth service and other one that manages the finances) written in Spring Boot; running on docker-compose on AWS ec2
- Learning how to run these two services behind nginx proxy and on SSL - using mkcert on local box and letsencrypt on aws ec2.
I work from home, teach my kids, and play EU4 to relax[0]. That's pretty much all my life is, at the moment.
My 11 year old son has decided we wants to make a table for his younger brother, so that might turn into a side project for me. If I'm lucky it turns into a side project for our carpenter neighbour instead.
[0] Yesterday after a disappointing job offer, I declared war on everybody.
Much lower than I expected. Then we talked, and I got a much better offer. Still low compared to freelancing, but there are other considerations, so I might take it.
My quarantine side project is improving electricity in my neighborhood. Advising others on surge protectors vs elevators.
Rallying others to unplug an entire new development that is leeching from our community transformer / meter. And then trying to build bridges so they start chiming in with $ if they want to connect again.
Now that everyone is at their households all the time it is easier to have people pay attention to chronic problems and fix them for good.
The other project is getting old computers of mine fixed up and giving them to households around with more than one child. Here in Colombia a lot of schools started doing remote but only 50% of kids have equipment to connect from.
I'm a huge aviation nerd and super curious about the impact of covid on that market. I've built a website that tracks which aircraft type flew where over the last days and what the average number of flights per day for that type is and was:
It already works well, but there's still a lot to do, like showing aircraft routes on a map.
The overall data provides a nice trend that is statistically stable, but since free aircraft data is hard to come by, coverage of regions that are not Europe or North America is not that great unfortunately.
I have created CodeKeep, Combining features from Google Keep to better organise your code snippets by tagging them with labels and categorising into folders, to Organize , Discover and Share Code Snippets. https://codekeep.io
It supports
- Organizing code with labels, description and title
- Organize code snippets into folders
- Generate screenshots of the code with 1 click
- Discover code snippets
I'm working on the integration part to vscode
I've been importing all Maine addresses into Open Street Map. I wrote the tools I'm using and open source published parts that I thought could be reused.
Yeah, I tried to switch off google maps and could only get directions to street intersections or towns. Instead of getting mad about it, I decided to fix it.
There's been plenty of computer-throwing and crying, but all worth it.
Now I can get directions without my phone highlighting every Mc Donalds and saying things like "turn left at the People's United Bank". I started to wonder if google chose routes which specifically sent me passed advertisers' stores.
I've been working on an web page to generate math exercises for my son as I was tired of coming up myself with new exercises every day during the home schooling period. I also wanted to learn more about frontend development. It uses Vue.js and requires no backend.
I wanted a free, easy way to listen to music with my friends, so I built this a month ago. It's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's simple and usable enough. It's mostly Go, with a nice ring buffer to keep streaming synchronised.
I got pretty tired of virtual happy hours and social events where there were people I was socially-adjacent to, but not very familiar with that I kept talking over. I've been working on https://mixaba.com to help solve that problem. It sorts people into small "rooms" and then shuffles the occupants so you get new people to talk to.
It's currently in MVP and I'd like to add more "fun" features to it to push it further into the social space and keep it out of the enterprise territory that MS Teams and Zoom occupy.
Cool, really like this idea, what are you using for the video chat to allow programmatically changing people? and how do you handle the data loads for hosting video? could imagine it could get pricey or is it peer to peer
Thanks! I'm using Twilio's Programmable Video API https://www.twilio.com/docs/video so there is a cost, but it's not a pre-provisioned service so it's manageable.
Started way before quarantine, but was able to complete /tap, https://www.tatatap.com with extra time. It's something like a build-your-own note-taking system.
Notes can be sent to /tap via SMS. Once received they go through a parser to pull out key symbols to organize and register different aspects of the note.
There's a lot of functionality hidden behind a simple interface, the best place to get an overview is the how-to https://tatatap.com/how-to
It was conceived before the quarantine. I built it so a group of people can play face-to-face without poker cards or chips. So I optimized for mobile use.
It seems that people are now using it on desktops playing remotely because of the quarantine.
Thank you. Still feels like and endless set of features to add: tournaments, hot keys, animations, etc.
It took about 2 weeks of nights/weekends to have something functional I could play with friends. The engine was the hardest part. Then another week to open to the public and then it’s been a few weeks of bug fixes before it started to feel pretty stable.
Agree. I wrote the engine in Node (so punted on the threading problem a bit) then just ported pieces of the engine to firebase functions to handle the actual computation. Made testing a bit easier as I could just simulate players client side. What did you build yours in?
I haven't seen much news about PPE shortages in the last few weeks. Is that because the situation has improved or just because it's unchanged and thus no longer exciting news?
In case anyone cares I'm sending MIDI to an Arduino board which I programmed to handle the events using a MIDI library. I then convert the midi notes to a frequency which I pulse on two digital pins driving an H bridge, which I hook up directly to the coil on the brush.
Working hard on Cutter, an open-source, free and libre Reverse Engineering project. It's cross platform and supports tons of architectures.
A debugger was recently introduced, as well as native integration with multiple Decompilers
Oh, this looks cool! I've been wanting to work on an r2-backed project like this for a while but never committed. Will have a deeper look into Cutter soon.
I’m working on a fitness platform, enabling you to find people to workout with either in your area, or with someone who shares the same interests/fitness levels as you. Super early stage, we have some designs and a landing page which you can check out here: https://yoke-app.netlify.app/
We’ve had to pivot our idea since the pandemic and we’re looking into working out via Zoom (for example), and allowing personal trainers to connect with clients on the internet. Appreciate any feedback or ideas!
I am working on Kanjimi, a browser extension for people learning Japanese.
My goal is to help people to read any Japanese website by adding information about the vocabuary words (pronunciation, meaning).
But at the same time I want this to be highly customizable and easy to use, because helping too much or systematically does not actually help to learn. So this has to be just right for everyone to be truly useful.
It is not released yet, but I made a mini-website and have a Twitter account for this project if anyone is interested:
Not quite a quarantine side project as I started in December, but i've been studying japanese as my side project. I've been able to take advantage of saving 45 min a day on my commute and putting that into study time.
Normally I manage a team and write software for the oil and gas industry but oil isn't doing so great these days. We used some mechanical engineering resources design it, laser cut it and prototyped it in the office bathroom, determined freedom to operate after a review of existing patents, and launched the webstore on Shopify with a colleague. This all happened in about two days!
I am building a free Japanese learning website at https://xn--wgv71a119e.app . It serves as a creative medium to improve my design and development skills, as well as my Japanese.
My vision for the project is to give learners the basic foundation of vocabulary, kanji, and grammar and to expose them as early as possible to native content (something that I wish I did sooner). For that reason, I utilize various media such as tweets and YouTube videos to make the content more natural (i.e. not textbookish), relevant, and engaging.
The project is still far from completion. A few days ago, I shared the early version of kanji module (https://xn--wgv71a119e.app/漢字) to a reddit community. If you are interested in the details, please check the post below:
Technology-wise, I am building the website with Next.js and wrote all sort of scripts such as asset generation, dictionary, and parser in Go. Aside from no support for utf-8 route in Next.js (I had to hack few things to make it work), the development has been smooth and pleasant.
I made this for my better half (she's learning Japanese too.) Point camera to object, app would read out detected object in your language of choice. https://travelshoppingbuddy.com/
I got laid off due to covid and needed to know how long my severance/covid check was going to last me so I built a site that looks at all your recurring income and expenses and tells you when you're gonna run out of money.
Definitely still a work in progress so be kind :)
There're a lot of apps that are either focused on one weightlifting routine (like 5x5 StrongLifts or Five3One) - they do nice job leading you through the routine, but if you want to try another one, you basically need another app. And if you want to create a custom routine, you're out of luck. There're also generic ones, like Strong or Jefit, but it's hard to make them follow some specific routine, increasing and decreasing weights automatically, changing exercises when necessary, etc.
I thought - how hard would it be to create a platform, that'd support many routines, and you'd choose any, and have a consistent UI across them you got used to?
Another thing I wanted to see - how hard it is to create a PWA app that is nice to use, and what features are still lacking there (compared to native experience).
The app is already in a usable shape, I use it 3 times a week, though it only has one working routine now. It's written in Preact/Redux/TypeScript.
It's a surprisingly pleasant experience to have a personal project like that, and slowly build it in your own pace, working on features you care, that would actually help you in your workouts. I found myself sometimes working on it til late night, being in that "flow", like in the beginning of my career, having so much fun, and returning back the joy of coding!
https://flexi.chat, a videoconferencing app where you can have a schedule and flexible speaking formats.
For example, you can have everyone in the meeting speak one after the other (the app handles muting and un-muting the right people), then repeatedly shuffle people into pairs so that everyone gets to talk 1-on-1 with everyone else. Or have a “speed-dating” style format for the first 20 minutes of your remote meetup, before bringing everyone back to the main room for the main speakers.
Barely ready to open it up yet, using it to host daily "standups" with my friends, but going to have a few friend gatherings with it later, and maybe a local meetup. The friend gathering will have the first schedule I mentioned above; have everyone speak in a circle to catch up the group on what they've been doing, then split the group into pairs (shuffling the pairs). The meetup will have the "speed-dating" + switch to main talks.
Uses Jitsi for the hard video webRTC stuff, and then nextjs with socketio for my application.
Getting back into React and ES6, and all the amazing new CSS stuff of the last 5 years!
Eventually I want to split it off so that the logic can be in its own package, to make it easy to integrate different speaking formats into different, existing apps.
Implementing a lightweight Activitypub social network in Rust. Put together an alpha instance with some of my friends on it. https://github.com/alexwennerberg/gourami
A private invite-only social site for friends and family to keep in touch and share stuff (not everyone is on Facebook, and we're geographically dispersed). Demo version is available [1]. It includes things like photos, calendar, simple direct messages etc. Yes of course there are ready-made solutions for self-hosting like Mastodon, but this has been a good learning/portfolio exercise.
I've been building a simple time tracking app. I wanted to learn Next.js, React, TailwindCSS more thoroughly so took this opportunity to build a website I actually wanted to use.
I found all the existing time trackings apps to be so bloated with features like invoicing, billing, teams, etc. I wanted something for myself to be able to keep track of how long I was spending at work and on various tasks.
The site looks good. Kudos. I was looking for an (android) app that does this. All the apps that I tried were so bad or filled with unnecessary things that I gave up on tracking the time for now.
I have been working on https://bifocalnews.com -- a news feed that scrapes political subreddits. This allows for a democracy-driven news feed with explicit bias stated for each article. Started this site for myself after realizing I had nowhere to go to get reliable political perspectives from both sides on popular topics, and I do not like that major news corporations get to choose what is on the front page.
I like how at first it just shows the headlines/articles. Then, if you want, you can toggle the "show bias" switch.
Have you thought about an option to gamifying it a little bit by letting the user guess which direction the headline leans? And then revealing the direction and the news source.
For example, when the "enable bias guessing" switch is toggled, there's a slider that appears on the bottom of the headline. Or, simpler, just two buttons that say left, right. You can guess all of the headlines on the whole page, then reveal and see how you did.
I like the idea of getting user feedback and gamifying the site a bit. It also might be interesting to take the bias guess results and show where on the spectrum of left to right site users think a headline falls. Thanks for the suggestion!
Now that everyone is working remotely, it's much harder to get to know your teammates. I built https://gettoknowapp.com as a Slack bot extension that sends you 1 question every M/W/F and posts it to a dedicated #answers channel. The whole app is contained within Slack - you can view people's past answers, upvote/like them, and the real fun is just seeing what your friends/coworkers had to say that you didn't expect about their answers.
I had used apps like Donut before and they felt oddly pushy and impersonal; you join a room and Donut will randomly select people to chat. Have you ever been in one of those arrangements? Extremely awkward openers. I wanted the questions to serve as a fun icebreaker to help people naturally discover interests together.
Oh and of course the tech. It's all built on Elixir. I run one web server and one database server and that's it. I already have about 100 communities spanning about 4000 people so in terms of message/event processing it is completely seamless...one of my favorite things about Elixir. Most interactions are processed in measure of microseconds rather than milliseconds. This makes for a real-time experience in Slack and is such a joy to work with. I also contribute to the Elixir-Slack open source project which has been fun working with as well.
I hope to incorporate more user feedback as it grows but so far it's been a great tool for teams in lockdown as they ramp up new people and want to quickly build them into their teams' culture.
Creating a SAAS that works sort of like a trello board to organise your travels, with each "ticket" being a Stay, a transport or an activity ("visiting the old street").
Get easy access to the location of everything you're about to do, and with the card system it's easy to reorganise your holiday on the go if you realise rain is going to ruin a prepared activity.
Almost finished the MVP, one more 3 days weekend and that should be it.
My partner and i were laughing about making a retro community website, free of adverts, trying to recapture the spirit of the old Geocities era web. It got a bit out of hand and we came up with https://www.vistaserv.net.
I apologise if folks have already seen it, since it actually (surprisingly) got a bunch of traction here on HN over the weekend, but that has been our quarantine project, for what it's worth!
I started a blog, https://codefaster.substack.com, to share a passion of mine: developer productivity. It's something I've done for myself for the past 9 years, reading countless books, trying enumerable tools, and even inventing a few originsl techniques. Now I want to help others who want to be more productive, especially now that corona has accelerated the need for automation.
I'm building a 6 degree of motion robotic arm from (https://www.anninrobotics.com/). It's open source so all CAD models, code is available online with all electronic components available off the shelf.
End goal is to clean a portion of bath tub or toiler semi-autonomously: manually attach different tooling like cleaning agent spray and brushes, but let the robot do the rest of work.
I built a powerful programmable recipe website. (WIP)
You write recipes in markdown, you can template in variables from javascript using handlebars.
Here is a recipe with a slider, it updates all the amounts in both the ingredients table and inline in the instructions themselves as you move the slider.
Already 5000+ downloads and many subscriptions. It's an app for stocks that focuses on displaying important events in a timline like manner instead of a watchlit.
Thank you! Feedback always welcome btw. I get my data from https://iexcloud.io/, but I plan to extend to other data sources as well, since you can't really get all the data you need from one data source.
Simple service to get the public IP address based on IPIFY API.
Lots of services already exist like this and my favorite is icanhazip.com. This is basically the same old service in a more memorable domain name. But it is helping me trying to learn Go and API development. https://about.ipaddress.sh/
Well, it would be cool if there was a site that just took the rSS feed of an Youtube channel, extracted it, and converted it to the podcast format so I could put it in my podcatcher.
I'm trying to spend my extra time on the boats I'm building ... I also hope to finish restoring a '71 Saab Sonnett III this summer (body is almost ready to paint but we haven't had a lot of low-humidity days this spring).
A friend of mine built a boat from scratch in his garage. Like, a real boat that you can take out into the ocean and ski and fish and everything. That kind of thing is no joke! Can you share photos??
Snowdrift.coop is a crowdfunding platform specifically for free/libre/open (FLO) public goods -- freely-licensed software, music, journalism, research, etc. It's based on a new funding mechanism we call Crowdmatching, where patrons pledge to support projects with a monthly donation proportional to the number of others making the same pledge ($1 per 1000 patrons).
We operate as a non-profit cooperative. The site itself is free software, written in Haskell (yesod) and we've also tried to stick with FLO tooling whenever possible, although we made an exception for hosting our source code, which is at https://gitlab.com/snowdrift/snowdrift
Of course, as a free software project, we suffer from the same funding issues we're trying to solve. The project is currently a 100% volunteer effort, and we're making slow (but nonzero!) progress towards our initial launch, when we start hosting our first outside projects.
One of our biggest bottlenecks right now is developer bandwidth. We have a handful of updated designs that address UX issues with the live site, and need to get them implemented -- if you know css, haskell, or both, we'd appreciate help!
In addition to replying here, you can also reach out on our discourse forum (https://community.snowdrift.coop), irc/matrix (#snowdrift on freenode, bridged with #snowdrift:matrix.org), or gitlab (above).
A little more detail, to avoid overloading the parent comment:
Currently making html/css changes on the site is a little bit painful, because they're the kind of thing that you often want to make small tweaks to until it looks right, and yesod is fond of rebuilding lots of stuff on each change.
To continue making forward progress while we've been short haskell devs, the design folks have been iterating on a prototype using a static site generator. Several of the new designs are static pages, so in theory it should be a mostly cut-and-paste job to move them to the real site. However, the css "framework" (ie, sass mixins) of the two have diverged a bit.
So, there's a number or ways in which progress could be made. In order from most long-term impact to fastest immediate progress:
- Haskell-side improvements to make the site build faster, so the designers could work directly on it for static content.
- Getting the site and prototype css back in sync, so that static pages can just be dropped in.
- Migrating individual pages from the prototype to use the main site css instead.
If you're interested in other aspects, there's governance, legal, and a few other miscellaneous tasks, too.
1) People who don't need all the features of Shopify and are more budget conscious
2) People from developing economies with a unique set of needs not addressed by the bigger platforms (e.g. African countries where access to credit cards is lower and where addresses are different/non-standardized)
Late to the party but never mind. I always wanted to read and write more, but creating such high-value habits are very hard to come by. In this lockdown, I decided to do something about that.
I read five pages from a book that interests me every day and then write about my interpretation.
To build a good reading and writing habit, I built a static blog using JAMStack technologies.
I used Hugo to make a static site and Netlify functions to call Google Book API, Forestry dot io to write my book blurbs every day. I integrated Amazon ads to implement related book recommendations. I use netlify to host and Github actions for CI/CD. It's a PWA out of the box and supports Google AMP.
The cool part is when writing a book experience, I provide the book ISBN, and my netlify function would go and grab book cover gif, description, author name from Google Book API automatically :-)
I am really pleased. I will start reading and writing from the coming Monday.
Wish me luck and follow me to encourage. I will open-source my Hugo theme which I named ”Morning Pages” and my blog on Github later this week. Cheers
I became overwhelmed with the massive list of content I saved in Pocket/ Instapaper but that I knew I'd never read, so I built myself a similar app where saved content disappears after 7 days.
If I don't read something in the week after I save it, there's a good chance I'm not going to read it ever.
Great job! I had pretty much the same idea a couple of years ago, but I thought of a different approach: a bot that will clear my Pocket backlog on schedule.
Sir you are a gentleman and a scholar. Will definitely check this out — I’ve had to fiddle around with Calibre to get Eugene Wei’s longreads on my kindle.
Taking my master's thesis project and turning it into a Analytics SaaS for Social Networks. My master's thesis[1] was a generic model for social capital based on Engagement and results in metrics of engagement and influence in a social network. For testing this out I built a social network[2] for sharing preprint and published papers. I am now generalising the metric calculating backend and providing it as a an API+Dashboards for other social networks who want to understand their network structure and identify members who enjoy a lot of attention, those who might not be popular across the entire network but enjoy a cult like status amongst their followers and people who participate the most on the network.
My quarantine side project is a Moodle SAAS, which will offer free moodle hosting with the ability to install any moodle plugins. Current offerings do not allow users on free tier to install additional plugins or custom themes. It still very early, but I appreciate your feedback and comments. https://xeted.com/
I've used the time to finish a few personal tools/projects I had only in my head or task manager (all in Python). I have actively tried to avoid more "work related" side projects, so I have avoided any Scala or data engineering related ideas I've had also for a while.
I have also brushed up on D3.js (for a project which hasn't appeared yet, but the result will also be used for the notes graph as an alternative to Graphviz) and generative coding (using p5js and threejs, the latter for fragment shader fractal stuff, https://github.com/rberenguel/sketches, most are still not up there, but only around my twitter feed). The generative coding path is also taking me towards tone.js and ORCΛ, but so far I have only dabbled in them.
I have also tried to spend a bit less time close to the computer per se (the generative "exploration" is done on my iPad mini in the sofa while watching something, for a start), and I have also tried to play some more music (ukulele, harmonica)
Edit: I always forget comments here are not written in Markdown
Nice. Also a Bear fan. I've actually tried your Graphviz code before! I just wish there was an opensource Zettelkasten-ish platform like Bear that I can customize to by extra nerdy preferences.
Likewise, although I have several requirements (offline available, Mac/iOS, nice-looking, Markdown...) that eventually rule out anything. Thanks for trying! If you have any suggestion please let me know :)
Mostly trying to get my 5 year old into some light programming :D
- I bought her Lego Boost (well, mostly myself, but we still have fun with it) and she is getting better at actually programming it
- I installed scratch junior on the chromebook she's been using (nice for mostly lightly interactive animations), we wen't through few of the work-assigments and she likes to fiddle with the included project-samples
Well, for me a big part was "I finally can buy myself the lego-robot my parents never bought me because it was too expensive" .
The fact that my 5 year old likes to build lego and is interested in robots is a nice bonus :D
And if your five-year old is anything like mine, brace yourself for the noise it can make :-) (most programming she is doing on her own are the embedded activities that produce music, sounds, e.t.c.)
Because I wanted to know what was going on in the world without too much COVID noise. It is a daily email from Wikipedia’s Current Events portal. Someone mentioned that i could have just used RSS, but it was quite fun to build something so small and have a fully completed project in a day
I love that idea. I use mail as my todo list and I prefer having such things in my inbox than digging through RSS or anything since I’m already using my email everywhere.
Also I had the idea of having an RSS to email service in the future a few months back which kinda goes into the same direction. So that would be one daily mail for all subscriptions.
Three of us are building online board games. Idea is to enable people to bring their board games online, and play with their friends. You can bring boardgames online by simply taking pictures of the board, cards, pieces etc., configure and launch.
Gameplay would be very similar to real world. You have to move the pieces and run the games yourselves unlike the usual online games where 'computer' will do the heavy lifting. We believe that managing the game is big part of having fun. Games will have integrated video chat and can play with friends like real life.
This is still an early stage. For example, we haven't opened up to users adding their own games yet. We added some games to test our platform. We are working on adding more capabilities to enable more games.
Some questions we are looking to find answers for:
- would you be willing to play boardgames with the current experience?
- what game would you be excited to play here?
I started a stock forecaster for the London Stock Exchange a couple of years ago although never finished it.
I've now integrated it with a couple of systems which allow me to get OHLC data as well as Regulatory News Service articles. And, in order to improve the quality of the forecasts, I'll soon begin integrating it with other news sources.
I've added it to (Collective 2)[https://collective2.com/details/128426551] and its currently making a loss as a strategy. This is good news because it's allowed me to identify why that loss might be occurring and where I could improve my strategy (I've found quite a few improvements in the last few weeks). The most recent improvements are active on a non-visible strategy on collective2
This forecaster could be applied to any global exchange. And I'm looking forward to the day where I can trade with it myself, sell the signals as a service, or sell it for a tidy sum.
Started with just playing around with spare electronics/Arduino, but now I've gotten sucked into the wonderful world of retrocumputing via this kit from Ben Eater. I've already built the basic kit computer, and now exploring 6502.org and other websites for extending it.
I've streamed live events for my local fighting game community for years and run charity events here and there, but COVID left a gap for my favorite game (Tekken 7) and I've decided that what better time than now to become a tournament organizer? So now I run something of a madhouse stream, with four total PCs and two separate lobbies to keep things flowing (nobody runs games as fast as we do) and it's genuinely an absolute blast to do.
Our events are open to the entire East Coast and last week we had 26 players from the US northeast. It is a good time to learn this stuff because it also helps my local community and others get in touch and start finding new players to play for now--and hopefully hang out with/play in person once COVID is lifted.
I’m building an open source accounting system with rpc endpoints being the primary method for inputting data and a SQL database that can be queried easily.
GoDBLedger:
https://github.com/darcys22/godbledger
For the most part that backend of the system is working how I want. I now need to build more front end ways to communicate to it.
One of the front end methods I’m working on is programmable journal entries. So you write your journal entries in a JavaScript file which gets executed in the context of the accounting system so you will have full access to the account balances. However this is still early stages:
Yurnell:
https://github.com/darcys22/yurnell
https://endorse.fyi/
*
It’s been disheartening to see our colleagues affected by COVID-19 layoffs and so my friend and I built Endorse.
The idea is simple - sign up if you need assistance or volunteer to help out colleagues with resume review, mock interviews, or referral.
If you’ve lost your job recently, tell us what you need help with most. We’ll match you with an amazing volunteer who can provide you with the assistance needed to find your next professional position.
*
This week, we launched Endorse on a couple of Facebook groups, Slack channels, and LinkedIn and have received ~80 sign-ups so far. We're two engineers who've greatly benefited from the Tech community and have built this as a way to give back. While the # of sign-ups helps validate the idea, we desperately need more volunteers who can help with resume review, mock interviews, and mentorship.
I've always been fascinated at looking at public feedback, for products and companies. I've been working on a dashboard that lets you explore recent iOS app reviews:
There's all kinds of fun stuff you can learn, like apparently Instagram just ratcheted up the number of ads shown and people don't like it. You can see different text topics people mention, and select time ranges in the volume and rating over time charts to filter.
You can look at other iOS apps too, just by adding the app ID in the search params. This page shows DoorDash's reviews:
I wrote a system so that people can help me to identify the steam traction engines featured in each one of my photograph collection.
The premise of the system was simple, you view a pic, type in the registration / license plate then move to the next. It has only three options, add, none visible or same as previous.
The system is offline at min whilst I prepare more images but here is a screen grab:
I advertised the link on a forum which I post on and was amazed at the response. The first 10k images I'd prepared were indexed within 24hrs and then a second batch of 20k in the same timeframe. The quality of results was very good, less than 5% error rate.
Ultimately I am going to choose the best and add them to a web site.
Some guys have said they'd like a similar system for their own photos. I suspect there could be a solution there for things like railway / transport photograph community.
Bridge is Chat for Business. It's basically a shopping protocol for chat that works over Telegram, WhatsApp or email – essentially chat commerce. It's not quite ready for a Show HN yet, but so far the interest in my city has been good.
I noticed that more and more companies were doing business over chat. Customers are clamouring to give them money over WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and Messenger, but these chat platforms are not designed for trade. Bridge is.
Under lockdown here in South Africa, every business has to become an online business, but traditional eCommerce is too heavy and inflexible for informal traders, especially if there is any barter and negotiation involved over delivery, shipping and payment method. Bridge crosses the chasm by adding structured negotiation to chat.
Importing FDA authorized masks for everyone else that can't buy in bulk quantities. MaskHQ.org if you or anyone else wants KN95 masks that are authentic and have a paper trail back to the actual manufacturer.
After getting into this, I've found out that there are a literal crap ton of people selling fakes and it is extremely hard to prove the source of the masks so I've been doing everything possible to provide transparency in the supply chain (including having customer names added directly to production contracts with the manufacturer).
PSA: KN95, N95, FPP2, and other NIOSH certified masks coming out of China are at a minimum around $1.5 per mask FOB (meaning to the manufacturer) then you have to get the masks into America with import taxes, ocean or air freight and then local last mile delivery and warehousing. That easily can add $1 per mask. My point, if anyone is selling masks for <$2 per mask in small quantities, they are probably fake. The raw material cost alone has skyrocketed for 99% material that is used in the production of >95% masks.
For example, our cost to reliably (~20 days) get 2M masks landed in the USA, ends up being $2/mask. That's without any profit and not including local delivery.
I own an export factory in Shenzhen and we buy acceptable quality kn95 masks for our staff PPE in low volumes of a few hundred or so masks per order, for 10-11 RMB each, ~$1.6 USD/mask. While there is a variance in quality standards depending on the manufacturer source, I think labeling anything cheaper than this $1.50ish as “fakes” is kind of not the full story in this PPE case. See, in China, instead of political parties posturing to give Five Trillion Dollars in stimulus funds away without much to show for it (like we didn’t even get a single new mask factory in America for this?) instead the “CHI-NA” Government did the smart thing by mobilizing manufacturers directly to make PPE, with terrific financing terms for equipment purchases and promises to buy whatever quantity of PPE stock was made, for any manufacturers that wanted to switch over to make PPE. We even considered taking this factory stimulus incentives ourselves to get into making PPE, but I ultimately decided against it because it was too hard to get workers and we had existing orders to work on with our staff. But many factories that didn’t previously make PPE got into it. Masks from those kind of factories are not maliciously “fakes” but the quality is more highly variable.
What you describe should be termed “substandard” with regards to testing standards, not “fake”. As an example, fake would be further labeling the mask with a 3M logo.
From my perspective as a person who's career has been in manufacturing, from the factory floor to supply chain consultant to factory owner who lived in China for 10-years, there is a distinct difference between definitions here of substandard quality and fake. If some company is trying to sell a non-3M designed and manufactured mask as a real 3M mask, that's the definition of "fake". If a company has poor manufacturing practices but is using materials which would otherwise be acceptable industry materials to make a mask to KN95 standards, but for some reason, a random sample of the lot is proven to be "Substandard" to the KN95 standards, that is the definition of "substandard".
A mask labeled as N95 that knowingly doesn't stop 95% of particles is a fake N95 mask. It is a real mask, it's a fake N95.
There's a big distinction between "we had a manufacturing error" sort of scenarios and folks who knowingly produce stuff that doesn't meet the standards (or don't bother to check).
"fake" is a subjective term and what I meant by fake was either substandard or direct knock offs of authorized manufacturers. we've been offered plenty of substandard "KN95" masks at <$0.10/mask.
btw, any of you at big (or small) companies that are looking at the daunting new normal of requiring masks at work (ie: uber drivers & riders) - please reach out - orders@maskhq.org
the HARDEST thing to do right now is match demand with supply. we had an entire production line (1M masks per week) running but once we fulfilled the order, that was it and now we are back at the "end of the line" to get more. the more we can pool large bulk orders together, the more consistent the supply chain is. ocean freight is ~20 days landed in LA and then 3-5 business days to get masks anywhere else in continental US.
for everyone else buying smaller quantities for personal use, as a long time HN lurker, use the discount code "HN" when ordering - https://maskhq.org/discount/hn
Thanks for doing this. You're probably saving lives.
So, obviously counterfeits are bad because they both steal profits from manufacturers and retailers who build quality products, and undermine trust in the real thing.
But, those are harms to manufacturers and retailers--what's are the harms to customers? We see some mixed evidence on the effectiveness of homemade cloth masks, and better evidence that authentic KN95 and N95 masks are effective. Where do counterfeit KN95 and N95 masks fall in relation? Does imitation of look and feel of a KN95 or N95 imply some degree of imitating the effective features of these masks?
These aren't rhetorical questions: I'm really asking because I haven't been able to find much information.
ditto. we were importing masks from an FDA authorized manufacturer: Suzhou Sanical under their private label: Maskin Model 9015 and literally after delivering thousands of them, the CDC put out a PSA about FAKE Maskin masks.
The boxes were similar but clearly knockoffs and it pretty much decimated the demand for Maskin branded masks even though we knew ours were authentic. Due to the bad press, the manufacturer then was put on notice by the Chinese government as well and ever since, we haven't been able to get a reliable amount of KN95's from them.
There honestly isn't very much information out there right now on masks and the differences and we're erring on the side of only putting out facts versus subjective information.
Wow. Talk about solving the real problems! I'm not sure if this has been an issue yet, but how do you QC masks from known good manufacturers to make sure quality doesn't slip?
this has been extremely hard. there are a handful of testing labs in the US but they require 35 masks to test. outside of that, they require a 2+ week lead time and aren't local.
if there are any engineers out there able to come up with some sort of solution to the testing problem, we'd absolutely work with them to test samples from every single production batch we get.
what folks don't seem to understand is if a shipment gets stuck in customs (china or US), you're effectively out whatever that batch cost. a fellow importer has 300k masks stuck in Shanghai customs for over a month already...
I've been trying to define the efficiency of wearing kn95 masks but you've probably looked into this extensively, tell me where I'm wrong:
Wearing a mask protects the people around you by not exuding the virus when sneezing/coughing, so covering your mouth with your elbow has the same effect.
I assume that while breathing there isn't enough pressure on your throat to exude virus with your breath, so the mask doesn't do anything here either.
In an isolated environment, the virus clings to particles in the air and takes 3h to gravitate down or towards a surfice, although this is faster in practice (weight of sneeze particles ann wind, etc) so when someone sneezes/coughs around you with no protection, you protect yourself by breathing through a mask. This is the only relevant benefit of wearing a mask that I found since I already cover my mouth while sneezing/coughing.
> I assume that while breathing there isn't enough pressure on your throat to exude virus with your breath, so the mask doesn't do anything here either.
Why would you just assume something so critical to your entire conclusion?
In any environment with virus particles airborne, you breathe 95% less of them.
This doesn’t help you if you constantly stick your hands in your mouth after touching random stuff, but if you take all other precautions the efficiacy is going to be pretty damn great.
subjectively by doing the flame infront of the masks and blowing as hard as you can to see if the flame is extinguished and filling the mask with water to see if it holds
there are lots of manufacturers in China that are producing for small children but none are certified. this is an area we are looking into sourcing for but due to there not being any sort of standard, it's very non-objective.
How are you protecting against "I wore your masks and still got sick" sort of lawsuits? Selling masks right now seems like a high-risk for these, even with meticulous attention to the supply chain.
I'm always puzzled by these "how do you deal with lawsuits" comments. Two questions:
1. Have you seen any examples of mask manufacturers/distributors being sued, either successfully or unsuccessfully?
2. How do you protect against the risk of litigation in everything else you do? For example, being sued by anyone who pays you money (customers or employers)? Their lawsuit may not be successful, but you would still have to defend against it.
IANAL; It doesn't appear that OP does any kind of QC, just extra work to say that the labeling on the masks isn't lying. I don't think the liability would be with them unless it was provable that they are lying or are tampering with the masks. They aren't putting their name on a "this won't get you sick" sticker.
On a broader note, if the burden of proof is on the accuser I have no idea how it would be possible to get a lawsuit like that of the ground in the first place. First off, how do you prove it was the mask and not a thousand other things? Also, manufacturers don't say things like "this mask will stop you from getting sick" because they know that would be a really legally stupid thing to say.
yeah, this is really tough. regardless of the merit of the claim, just having to defend against a suit sucks not only resources but just everything. the best I could do was get as much liability insurance I could to protect the LLC I created for the purpose of importing and selling the masks.
figured the reward of getting these KN95's in the hands of folks who need them other than hospitals who have their own supply chains, outweighed the risk of a suit.
we also explicitly state that the masks are for non-medical use and reference the CDC/FDA for everything.
They're N95 masks, meaning that they're 95% effective... How do you sue against something that's specifically advertised as 95% effective? You would need to do a class-action with enough sample size to power statistics...
The claim for N95 masks is not that they are effective for 95% of people, it's that they filter out 95% of small particulate matter. The remaining 5% may or may not be enough to infect anyone, or 5% of those wearing, or 100% of those wearing.
The manner in which you would make a legal claim that the product is not as advertised is to take the mask and use the same certification process the manufacturer claims to be using to test efficacy.
One can get infected by touching something and then touching their face. So how does one prove that they did not do anything that might have caused them to get infected?
Building the Redis API using DynamoDB as the storage backend. I want a way to have storage that can handle any load without having to provision server or pay when it wasn’t being used. Dynamo is superb, but the API is too low level and arcane to use directly.
Want to try selling licenses as well, let’s see if I can do open source full time.
As I mentioned in a thread earlier today, and at the urging of some friends, I am working on the 0.1 release of my personal programming language.
It is a language based on explicit parallel and sequential composition of expressions (very similar to the concatenative languages family) with an underlying categorical semantic/type theory based on Adjoint Logic (work by Pfenning, Reed,Pruiksma et al and work by Licata, Shulman, et al with the Simple Intutionisitic fragment replaced by a Dependently typed fragment (ala Krishnaswami) and all based on work in the ‘90s by Nick Benton).
I set myself a goal since I’m in lockdown of having a landing page with minimal compiler and hopefully a small web based playgraound published before July 1. I have really been enjoying the work I’m doing on this and hope everyone else is having a good time working on their stuff amidst all the external upheaval.
Instead of stating something new, I updated and added all the features i wanted in an app. I built the app to help me make solutions for reagents in chemistry lab , I was getting irritated by the calculations every time i had to perform a reaction in lab. It balances any valid chemical equation and gives you stoichiometric calculations with support for limiting reagents. With their molar masses. Also supports equations with fractional atom molecule (Doped Materials)( which was the real reason i made this). It has 65k+ total downloads with 10k active users.
Feed back is welcome (Noob at programming,Nano Physicist by education)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kharblabs....
I've been trying to become a better Clojure programmer, so have been attempting to use Clojure and Clojurescript almost exclusively for my side projects, especially since I don't use it at work. First I built a real-time version of the board game Gobblet, a pretty cool two-player board game I learned about recently (Kinda like Connect 4 with a surprisingly interesting twist). After getting it to the point where I could play with my friend over the internet I moved on. Now I'm working on a GIS project. I'm really slow at getting things done with Clojure but I can tell I'm getting faster.
I've also been enjoying lunchtime and evening walks. Something about going on walks seems to generate many project ideas for me. As a result, my list of projects to work on has been growing way faster than my ability to actually complete those projects.
I'm working on a platform to generate simple CRUD APIs from JSON schemas: https://stackprint.io
I noticed that while working on past side projects I spent a lot of time writing simple CRUD APIs, permission checks, client code to connect and model classes which (at least for me) is usually not the most fun part when working on new app idea ;) So I started creating a concept to automate most of that for future projects and developed a simple web platform around it.
During the quarantine I've been mostly working on a set of permission rules to control access to API resources. I also started on generating client code which at least works for Angular at this point. I'm very hopeful that I can stay productive and get it to work for React/VueJS and iOS/Android as well soon :)
I made https://lessnoise.net/, which recommends who you should unfollow on Twitter (right now it's very basic and just shows you who tweets the most out / is noisiest of everyone you follow)
I'm in my 30's and have always struggled with how flexible I am. Since lockdown I've spent just about every evening mobilizing anything that feels tight or uncomfortable has been a game changer.
I'm finding that I feel physically pretty great, less tight, aches/pains have faded away though there are still a few old injuries I'm working through.
Lockdown has been hugely helpful in maintaining the habit: kids go down in the evening, take the dog for a walk and stretch until you go to sleep has been a great way to unwind.
If you're looking to get started, I initially followed this guy's[0] youtube channel for a month, then started doing what felt right for me.
I've been working on a texture/video synthesis framework for VJing / music visualization on a large LED installation. It uses a node editor (no relation to node.js) visual scripting approach to pipe data between different shaders (like a fluid simulation) and signal generators (like MIDI or Xbox controllers).
I'm trying to get myself to wake up at 06:00 AM to go for an early 20 minute morning run. As an insomniac this has proven to be really difficult. But I really like running, even when I'm out of shape, as it has been a part since I was a kid.
I think I'm inching towards a stable rhythm though, but time will tell. I always need 2 months of a stable rhythm to be fully sure that I got a rhythm locked in.
Here is what I figured out so far:
- Magnesium before sleeping
- Vitamin D when I wake up, especially now since I'm sitting inside all the time.
- Obviously basic sleep hygiene that all the popular blog posts write about (fun fact: I use Iris instead of Flux, it dims the screen even more).
- Melatonin when I can already tell I won't be able to sleep anytime soon. I used to try to fall asleep on my own strength for way too long. Things I've tried: meditation (my username is derived from it), progressive muscle relaxation, not thinking about anything (I am quite good at this), visualizations of being in familiar places, exercise and going to the doctor. It all doesn't work. What does work: melatonin. Only since recently I've been a bit more aggressive with it (after 25+ years of sleep issues).
This leaves me with one issue: sometimes I wake up after 4 hours of sleep. My usual way of dealing with this is being awake for another 4 hours, so I can sleep my second quartet of hours. The problem: I wake up around 11:00 AM when I go to bed around 11:00 PM.
So what I'm trying now, since my lifestyle supports it, is waking up between 04:00 AM and 06:00 AM so that I have enough leeway to sleep a bit more. I'm starting a job soon and I have to be 09:00 AM in the office. This is my makeshift solution.
I think this is what people did some centuries ago: Wake up in the middle of the night and do some stuff, then go back to sleep for a couple of hours. See [1].
I also have issues sleeping. When I sleep at my parents house, I sleep excellently. I did sleep there for a week a couple of months ago and I never felt so good. The downside is that my girlfriend gets upset when I sleep there for a week (and my parents think I'm in a fight with my girlfriend).
Things that might explain why I sleep so much better at my parents house are:
- It's darker
- It's less noisy
- There's a better bed
- There's no-one sleeping next to me in the same bed
- Maybe I feel safer if I sleep on the second floor of a big house instead of right next to a street?
Ah, yea. Varying sleeping locations, I've done that a lot, unintentionally. I've slept in humble homes to mansions to far out locations (my own place being a humble home). My best sleeping moments are when I go camping and rise and fall with the sun. That's the only time when I am capable of sleeping normal, waking up and falling asleep with the sun, no clock needed.
Here are my experiences to what you said.
It's darker: I use a sleeping mask.
It's less noisy: I used earplugs but I have tinnitus and it acts up when I do that. Currently though, it's not noisy because of Covid. Maybe I should have a noise cancelling / ambient white noise system. The normal tinnitus levels don't bother me, airplanes flying do.
Better bed: turns out, I love a mattress on the ground the most.
Sleeping next to people: that's funny, I sleep better sleeping next to someone! Well, we all differ.
Regarding safety: that's how I feel when I sleep next to someone. Not that I feel unsafe sleeping alone, not at all. I simply feel safer.
Have you tried just sleeping, waking up, running, without the magnesium/vitD/melatonin/iris/flux/etc. People have managed these basic tasks fine without all these props for a very long time.
You're so off the mark with your comment, the only way my message might get through to you is by being very direct.
You're right, there are also a lot of people who are capable of simply going to sleep. But if you think that there isn't a sizeable group of people in society who have difficulty with this, then I have news for you.
You're wrong.
Also when I state I have issues with this for 25+ years, do you really think I haven't heard these type of comments or advice? Because if you think your comment is something that I have never heard before, or am not aware of, then I have news for you again.
You're wrong.
The reason I'm replying: you're either trolling (if so, touche) or you're serious. Since you have 500+ karma (aka leave some good comments), I simply wanted to give you this feedback. Because I know my stuff when it comes to sleep by (1) dealing with, by (2) studying the neurobiology of it in my psychology undergrad multiple times. Moreover, I know the group of people I fall in (the group that has trouble with sleep). I can't speak for them but I have an idea of how they feel and think since I'm recognizing what they say in my own experiences.
No worries, I am not hurt by directness, in fact I appreciate not sugarcoating an argument.
I was not trolling. For most of the stuff you list it is not clear at all that they have any effect in general, and if they do, it is not clear whether it is positive or negative, or of what kind. It is perfectly rational to be cautious with these things and fall back on things that have been tried and tested for millennia: spending time outdoors, fresh air, good eating, physical exercise.
I am not claiming that these would solve your specific problems, I am just putting out a list of tools. You have also done so, and someone naively browsing may try out either of the two sets. Mine has less chance of being harmful.
On sleeping there was also a very informative essay by the supermemo guy, good sleep good life, or something like that.
Ah, now it makes sense. Thanks for the claryifing comment.
I agree that people shouldn't grab pills as a first resort. In my case, they are my last resort and only after circling around other resorts multiple times. I'm not a fan of pills.
In hindsight, I should've disclaimed in my main comment that I feel this is working for me. It was not intended as advice. I was simply talking about my side project (getting myself to sleep, so I can run in the morning).
The effects of melatonin are super noticeable. It's like taking drugs: you pop a pill, and feel different 30 minutes later. Melatonin makes me feel drowsy.
There is no placebo here. After 15 to 20 minutes, I always get irritated and ask myself: why doesn't it work?!
It does, just a bit later.
===== Vitamin D ======
Sorry that I'm sourceless on this. I read somewhere that melatonin and vitamin D are inversely related in their cycles of when they peak. Someone suggested to take it in the morning.
Regardless of whether the timing is off or right, vitamin D is needed to not be depressed [1]. So this part might be a placebo (like I care, I'm pragmatic) and at best it does something.
I do notice that it indeed prevents me from feeling like shit by virtue of sitting inside all the time. That also might be a placebo (I still don't care, placebo's are demonized and it's a competitive advantage if you accept it). The trend has been going on for 2 weeks now.
[1] Note: there are way more sources. I just did a quick Google search and picked the first URL I could find.
If you take a lot of vitamine D, you also want to take some extra vitamine k2.
However, vitamin D and calcium supplementation along with vitamin K deficiency might also induce long-term soft tissue calcification and CVD, particularly in vitamin K antagonist users and other high-risk populations
I've been a chronic insomniac for as long as I can remember and melatonin changed my life. Recently though, I've been having trouble getting to sleep again, and waking during the night. I've also recently started taking Vitamin D at the same time as my melatonin and hadn't twigged that that might be why. So thanks, gonna switch that one to the morning.
For me the quarantine turned my side-project into a full-time project. So I am now working non-stop on https://www.usertrack.net, trying to make the best analytics tool and also start a broader self-hosted movement.
Thank you! I do know abnout that list (userTrack is already listed in the non-free section).
The problem with self-hosting now is that it's usually only for techincal people who know how to setup and maintain servers. I am trying to make so that you can setup, use and maintain my platform with a few clicks, without any technical knowledge. Currently I started doing that by using the cloud-init script for DigitalOcean, so you can go on DO, create a new droplet (with a few clicks), choose LAMP stack and add my cloud-init script which would automatically download and install userTrack. I think this could be optimized even better, in the future I "dream" of a world, where you chose your software (eg. self-hosted Facebook-like platform) and with one click you have your own server running it. I think the DO marketplace is a good start, but they should allow an easy way for developers to sell through their marketplace. I know docker somewhat solves parts of this problem, but for the non-techincal person, with the majority of the software you still need to do some configuration, SSH into some server or setup DNS records.
And with userTrack I feel like I can make a difference, as it's not only self-hosted but I do plan to make it the best analytics tool for landing pages or small websites. By having something that is better, you can make people think about the advantanges of self-hosting, people which would have never thought about that before.
I love the direction you're tracking here (pun not intended). The feature list is impressive, too. userTrack is now on the front of my list of options.
I've been working on a self-hosted social media scheduling tool (buffer/meetedgar-alike). So far it's just for my own use, but you've given me hope that there's a non-SaaS path to market. Thanks.
Thank you for your kind words. I am currently adding A/B testing functionality to userTrack.
Everyone pressures me to change the model into a service, but I think that by sticking to the product way I can understand what the biggest pain points are for users and the current state of the internet when setting up your own services/products instead of renting them. Also, I plan to open-source it at some point after I can earn enough to sustain myself.
Discord is where my programming career started. My very first (serious) project was a Discord bot back in 2016, so I attribute pretty much everything I have to the platform. Obviously that made me care a lot for it, which means when it became worse with every update it always stung a bit. Off the top of my head though, here are the things I find baffling about Discord:
1. You can't resize the channel list, and when resizing it's prioritized higher than the main chat window. This means that after a certain threshold of width the application is unusable.
2. The developer experience is very lackluster. On Slack you can integrate your application to the point where it almost feels like it's a platform feature (you can even define slash commands with parameters and tooltips). On Discord the best you get is reactions on messages.
For more on this, recently I had to verify the bot I mentioned in the beginning of this comment, as per October 2020 all bots in more than 70 servers will need to be verified. I went against my better judgement and sent them a picture of my documents, and after the lengthy process I tried to use the application transfer feature and was denied specifically because it was verified. Support basically flipped me off and directed me to their feedback forum no one reads.
3. No threads.
4. Pretty much no control for voice comms. In video game contexts it's useful for the leader to be able to speak uninterrupted (muting everyone else in the call) at the press of a button. TeamSpeak has had this for 18 years.
5. The permissions system is bonkers. Some actions are either nonexistant or hidden under items that make no sense. For example, what do you think the "Embed Links" permissions does? It allows/forbids you to send links, right? Wrong. You can send links, but it supresses the embed. If you need to supress links you need to use a bot.
6. Keyboard navigation is broken. If you're on #channel2 of server 1 and want to go to #general, it makes sense to press Ctrl+K, type #general and press enter. You can do that, but it will throw you to a channel named #general in a random server you're in.
7. Lazy loading of members sometimes means it's literally impossible to ping someone, even when they show on the autocompletion.
8. Sometimes you click a channel and it'll be scrolled way far up. You then respond to a message, it gets scrolled down and you realize you're responding to what someone said 3 days ago.
I've no idea if fixing these is enough to bring users in, but this project is important because it'll either succeed or I'll get some appreciation for Discord again. I can't justify using it anymore after 4 years of broken update after broken update.
Kidalist.com - crowdsourcing the best kid activity ideas.
Problem = parents get many suggestions some helpful, some clickbaity or low quality (too much mess/effort/clicking). Solution = crowdsource, moderate, and upvote for the highest quality ideas, categorize them and allow users to bookmark their favorites.
Anyone can submit an idea - a link plus short description and category choice. The moderator (just me right now) checks submissions for safety and quality before publishing them.
Visitors can upvote the ideas they like and submit comments on resources that might help other parents.
Logged in users (just email and password sign up) can bookmark their favorites.
If you have a great kid activity idea to share please submit it at https://kidalist.com/
Me and my friend have been building a Social Sampler to make music over the internet. Now that the quarantine happened we managed to get a beta out, its taking up most of my free time: https://miidbaby.com/
I've been working on my side project https://checkweather.sg/ - weather rain radar on a map thingie. Looks simple, usually boring when there's no rain, but I got to learn how to build those cool vector radars with d3-contour, Mapbox GL JS and stuff. Example: https://twitter.com/cheeaun/status/1259698644908834816
A submersible time-lapse camera set-up using a RPi Zero, battery pack, and camera.
I was working on repairing an inflatable dinghy earlier (over a dozen individuals patches!) and finally got it working and moving with a electric trolling motor. I can go free-diving from it and was looking for something else to do. The goal is to be able to put everything in the water-tight enclosure on shore, motor out to a spot in a kelp forest, drop anchor, hop over the side, and swim down to a good spot to place the camera.
When that's done, I'll hang out for a bit playing around in the water or eat lunch/read a book or something in the dinghy, then go back down to grab it and then head back inshore and hope I've gotten some cool imagery!
I'm working on a system that generates fantasy worlds. It's meant for RPG players, especially those that do solo tabletop play.
It's more simulationist than similar worldbuilding tools. I recently rewrote the climate generation to be closer to reality. You can read about that here:
The TDA, biggest art student competition in Europe, was scheduled in Barcelona in April. Because of COVID-19 it was impossible for the few thousands students to meet there. So I made a mobile app to host the competition online, which replicated all the rules of the traditional contest. It got around 2000 signups during the week of the contest and made the competition possible remotely. I decided to keep it live and run new contests for artists everywhere in the world during lockdown. You can check it out and vote for your favorite artists, or join the contest yourself, there : https://greatest.app.link.
I did a show hackernews a month ago and it did pretty well. It's been pretty great since then.
I have had people write to me thank you emails and some pretty cool stories like one grandparent that told me they used it to read to their newly born grandchild!
On top of that it has got me back into programming which I don't do in my day job and it finally gave me a project where I can use Phoenix liveview.
Now as a family we have also got into baking bread - we didn't realize how easy it is to make good bread at home and it just taste so much better. It's been a lot of fun and the kids love doing it with us.
This is a slack app that makes sure nobody would miss your memo/task. I'm currently waiting for Slack's app review, but it's ready for use. This is my first SaaS project too. It's built using Rails 6 and Sidekiq.
- I re-did a project I first pursued when I was really really young. It's called Mapnews.io and it shows you what's happening where today. It's a collection of RSS News with geolocations shown on a map. Uses Cloudflare Workers & Apple Maps - both have been awesome! Happy for any feedback! https://mapnews.io
I run a career newsletter and a common topic/question I got from my subscribers was about choosing an online course to do and how to 'make the most' of quarantine.
Seems like so many of us (myself included) just miss the process of learning, whether that's learning a new skill or just personal development/mindset related concepts.
To help find a course to do, I made this simple one page site and included the most highly rated free courses from across a few different sites, whether that's Coursera, YC, edX or Youtube: https://resumeworded.com/free-online-courses/
I had a very stress inducing experience where I couldn't find something at home depot and had to ask an employee where it was, which was hard to do since talking to strangers during a pandemic is stressful even when everyone has masks on.
So I had the thought of making a chatbot that is hooked up to their inventory database that can tell you where particular items are located. I'm just building the first prototype entirely in AWS, both to learn AWS and to make it easier on myself.
I figure that shoppers will use it because talking to a chatbot feels safer than asking someone in real life, and businesses will want it because it gets people out the door faster so the lines to get in are shorter.
I've been building out new features like crazy on my recipe app Reciplay (https://getreciplay.com/) including a Google Vision and FastText powered recipe scanner.
Duobiblo (https://app.duobiblo.com/) allows to practice a language showing chapters of the bible side-by-side with a language you already know. I learn Portuguese currently on Duolingo, which inspired the name. If a browser supports the Web Speech API for the given language it is also possible to let the browser read the text.
Your original comment wasn't deleted. There are just so many comments in the thread that the software is paging them, so you have to click through the More links at the bottom to see them all.
In the repository there are several experiments, each consists of Jupyter/Colab notebook (to see how a model was trained) and demo page (to see a model in action right in the browser).
For now I've created only 10 experiments (i.e. Digits Recognition, Object Detection, Image Classification, "Write like a Shakespeare", etc.). But the plan is to do some more experimentations with GANs and RNNs.
Your builder is much more "builder". I like the drag and drop you implemented (that I can see in the video anyway). What I built was more "you can have any color as long as it's black".
I'm not sure to understand why a subscription business model is more adequate than a one time payment for a resume service. Who would need to update his resume every month ?
I can absolutely appreciate that but as a single person project some choices have to be made to make any project polished and makeable in a short period. I chose Firebase for that one.
Thanks! The price gives you an annual license for upgrades. If you still want upgrades after a year, I'm thinking a 50% "re-subscribe" cost for another year.
I've always thought it's a shame that all the blogging platforms seem focused on public access, so I've been working on an open-source private blogging platform. Nothing technically complex but aims for super-easy scripted deployment (currently on AWS, also thinking about Raspberry PI), so that you don't need to entrust a big tech company with stewarding access to your content. I'm using it for sharing pictures of my daughter with friends and family.
Yet Another Focus Music generator to solve many of my problems using other services throughout the years.
What works best for me to focus is a combination of many services that exists on the market, so at the end I had to tune into many web apps on my browser which hogged my memory and I had to pay for many subscriptions making it a really expensive solution.
So I created this service, is still a work in progress, but I have been running to polish everything during this quarantine, right now I feel it is at a 90%.
I've restarted work on https://ayahbyayah.com an iOS app which I originally released in 2012 as a simple app for listening to the recitation of a single Ayat (verse) of the Qur'an.
I've been performing intermittent upgrades over the years as I wanted to retain the simplicity, ease of use with a focus on providing the most accurate and clearest Ayat text in any app.
The latest update has incorporated word by word audio timings and advanced play back controls for a completely hands-free operation, even serves as a teleprompter for the Qur'an.
I've done a lot of work on my opensource collaborative whiteboard, WBO: https://wbo.ophir.dev/
During lockdown, many teachers and companies are looking for new ways to work online, and google searches for "opensource online whiteboard" have exploded. I noticed a surge of activity on the site, and that motivated me to spend more time on it. The tool has also received its most significant external contributions since its inception several years ago. I just hope the interest will not fade away once the pandemic is over.
I have built a rust based version of the 2048 game which runs in the terminal. The most interesting and fun part is the small AI that I implemented and which can be used to play automatically.
It's nothing very new, but I enjoyed crafting this small game in the most elegant and efficient way I could.
I’m still quarantined, working from home. I have been working on a new note taking app, with real time sync, web access, apps on all major platforms (Android, iOS, Windows, OS X and Linux), offline support, and a new take on organization and retrieval of information that I have really been enjoying using personally. Email me from my profile if you want into the alpha, I am dark launching this weekend and will start advertising once the first batch of feedback and fixes goes in. I’ve already gotten a ton of interest from HN and I’m really excited to get some real users besides myself!
I've finished my Bullet Journal iOS app. I've never really found an iOS app that allowed me to managed tasks like my paper Bullet Journal (which is to heavy to carry around all the time). https://bulletweek.app
Also I'm using a lot the timer with my Apple Watch and I needed something faster than the built in timer and I can't every time use Siri. So I made one fast is more fun & faster as well with multiple modes: https://primetimer.app
Professors have to run research groups in addition to teaching and committee work. It's very similar but different from the industry/corporate world so I'm working to tailor things specifically to academia.
I had actually started it before the pandemic, but it's even more relevant now! Trying to get a beta out soon very soon, and some real screenshots for the website. It's about 80% there but things are finally moving again for me.
Really interesting! A space I've thought a lot about after making the PhD-> startup transition and realizing the total lack of administrative training academic professors get (and the frustration of their students). Would love to connect and see if I can be helpful in any way!
I’m working on a 1 inch bell siphon for vertical hydroponic growers. Growers will be able to use one pump to send water to a top grow tray and have the siphon drain the water into a tray beneath. The siphon on the tray beneath will then start and drain water to the train below it. This cascade of water will finally drain back into the reservoir of water and the cycle will begin again.
I’ve been working on this for the last month and finally got it working. It will be listed on my site soon.
I am working on Dwata, a (planned to be) power admin that is language/framework agnostic. Works with SQL and third party APIs (Stripe, Mailchimp, etc.) and has tons of team collaboration features, things that I have seen repeatedly in my 14 years/10 startups experience.
Self-hosted and open source, but I surely want to make a living off this.
I have a sandbox project I built some time ago to synchronize watching youtube videos with friends (https://lifeboatradio.com). A small group of us use it as a shared radio similar to grooveshark back in the day. During quarantine I am trying to build a similar version that allows you to synchronize watching videos from other sources, so I can hold a virtual movie night with friends. Hoping to use the output of this project to improve lifeboat too and bring it back up to date.
My consulting work is pretty quiet right now so I'm working lots on Trolley [1] - my payments tool.
Lots of people right now seem to be looking for new ways to get paid / make money / start little businesses from home, and being able to send quick payment links over social / SMS seems a common requirement.
(a 2nd / 3rd-order COVID effect I guess!)
Things are taking off for Trolley - acquiring 1-2 new customers a day right now :) Trolley is still just me, so I'm plenty busy!
Working on a game called Themengi (https://vgel.me/themengi/), where you learn an alien language to navigate a world via text commands and dialog. Currently taking a break from the game itself to rewrite the linguistic parser for the game in Rust, which you can follow in my blog series: https://vgel.me/posts/symbolic-linguistics-part1
I'm maintaining Delta and trying to help out a bit with Eglot -- an Emacs LSP (Language Server Protocol) project, and trying to improve my Rust and Lisp along the way. LSP in Emacs with Eglot is fantastic (especially for Rust, but also Python. Those are the only ones I've tried so far.)
Sadly I've got busy with client work again. It needs serious thought about the UI and I need to figure out how to either widen it's appeal or reach its niche audience.
I find it endlessly fascinating and I naturally assumed others would too. :-)
It's largely based on work that John Conway did and I was looking forward to showing it to him at some point. Sadly we both ran out of time.
I have been working on a Kahoot alternative, Please find it on https://github.com/surajcm/darkhold . At work, we use Kahoot a lot to have fun tech quizzes and it really inspired me to create an opensource alternative with spring boot.It is not a complete clone (I don't want to be in trouble with copyright issues), I used some of the interesting functionalities to create a qurantine remote quiz tool. Any feedbacks are welcome :)
Looks like a very nice project. Just a minor remark: if you don't own quiz.com please consider changing the package prefix: com.quiz.darkhold implies that the code is from quiz.com. Perhaps com.github.surajcm.darkhold.
I'm writing an actor system in Webassembly (C#/Blazor).
Once it's in place, it can be used with a rendering backplane (SVG). The ultimate goal is to make the actors be able to move to where they are needed (moving the code to the data instead of the other way around).
One important aspect is that the system is completely message driven. An actor can become anything by sending it a message. Yes, there is a security aspect to that :) It should also be compositional, in that the behaviors of it's essences compose.
I've been building a packing list app for ultralight bikepacking, hiking and just a general outdoor gear library. I've had a surge of interest from niche reddit communities and a few hundred test flight users. I'm finding it hard to find time to work on it right now as freelance work is picking up again. Stack wise the majority of the app is written in Kotlin and shared on iOS and Android (haven't got the Android version out yet).
Been doing a lot of meat smoking, but also toying with
https://phonefilter.io - easy set up a rick roll or a redirect phone number. Basically a throw away number with a bunch of configurable uses. Just a simple drop down to change what the number "does"
Also https://www.instagram.com/bestofstackoverflow/ - funny stack overflow posts
(1) Bython, a basic Python interpreter written in C. I just want to have a taste of what it's like programming out a language so I won't go too far. It is dynamically typed and has automatic memory management. https://github.com/remykarem/bython. PRs welcome!
(2) minishell. This is a simple shell with only 2 commands: either you (i) hit enter to view 10 files of a folder at a time, or you (ii) enter a filename and view nbytes. I built this because a co-worker wanted to view a folder with 20+GB of files but couldn't do it with an `ls`. With this, I hope that we can casually explore a folder without having to print everything. https://github.com/remykarem/minishell.
A web based vector drawing program for dynamic visualizations inspired by Bret Victor [1]. Think adobe illustrator + excel... every property on an object can be a reactive mathematical expression with data and object dependencies. Data changes -> property value changes -> rendering changes. I'm pretty excited about the possibilities here!
Ya agreed! I've wanted to build this thing for a few years now ever since I saw Bret's demo.
https://twitter.com/getfiggo -- Nothing really going on yet. I'm maybe 2 months away from having a working prototype. Spent about 6 months working on the core rendering engine: reactive property expressions, repeating groups (like a rectangle + label for a bar chart), paths with repeated segments (for line charts) and am now working on drawing tools and how a user can wire things up.
Here's a fun little animation I made while experimenting with the tech [1]. I was pleasantly surprised at the awesomeness that can come out of simple systems.
I created a web console for AWS to overcome one of my major frustrations with the original one: being able to see resources from multiple regions from view.
Of course the AWS console is enormous, and this is just a side project with some resources - not interested in replace the original one, just being able to monitor resources from all the regions we deploy in :-) WIP of course, and I am not a frontend developer, so be gentle :-D
Writing demos for my Javascript library, trying to push it to its limits, uncover bugs, etc. Fun stuff.
Also writing "teach yourself" lessons for the library ... which is not so much fun, but does helps uncover "softer" bugs like: "why do I expect people to code that thing this way? Is there a simpler, happier way to do it?"
(Yeah. Talking to myself out loud. Not a good habit to develop during the lockdown.)
Beyond coding, I've mostly been putting back on all the weight I lost over the past two years. I'll start exercising tomorrow.
Took the lockdown time to completely revamp Flexlists(1) which is a side project we launched 15 years ago and has a solid (slowly growing) fan base who have been crying for new features etc but the codebase is a horrorshow (we used to launch 1 new project per week at that time so this was written in a week which the code does show). So I took this time to rewrite and redesign it completely. Hopefully the new version will launch this month.
I'm building a small tool to automate authorizing and revoking AWS Security group rules.
I've been working from home on a sometimes unstable connection, so I've been using Mosh a lot. It was a bit tedious to update the security groups manually whenever my IP changed, and I'm also in the process of learning Rust, so this looked like a good project. It's not yet operational, though.
The plan is to start with an Android app and a macOS app to solve for my personal use-case and add more platforms in the future. The primary motivation was the lack of good markdown apps that sync between Android and macOS. Bear notes is the closest, but they don't have any plans of creating an Android app.
I've been learning to bake from scratch, and have successfully made several different types of bread, cookies, muffins, and biscuits. I am hoping to soon try my hand at making pastries.
I have launched a project where I sell Keycloak themes and share tips for Keycloak users [1].
Keycloak is a very good Identity Manager but the default theme is not easily adaptable. Making new themes also requires effort and a little bit of knowledge, which means additional time to invest in learning the platform.
On KeycloakThemes you can find ready-to-use themes (for now one, more to come) that you can upload and start using in 5 minutes.
For many years I've had the habit of remembering and noting down my dreams first thing every morning. I wanted a place for collecting & analysing all these dream reports.
So I built this journaling app. It's a PWA that encrypts everything before syncing. For now I'm just testing it with friends, but I want to launch it in the coming weeks.
It's not exactly a tech side project, but I recorded a 30 minute comedy special in my garage that's freely streamable. I was hoping to use it to raise some cash for COVID relief through ads, Google keeps denying my AdSense activation, so now I'm hoping someone at least donates to World Central Kitchen or buys a download version: https://insidejokes.org
Now with that shipped, I'm thinking about some actual code projects. :)
- [1]: I took a Coin Pusher arcade game and put together some electronics and software to make it playable through a Twitch stream. I thought it'd be fun to make and an interesting idea (especially with people being stuck at home), but it hasn't really gained much traction. It's currently a functional "MVP", but I haven't gotten any players so I can't figure out how to iterate and improve it. I built it using NodeJS, C++, a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino, a 3D printer, and an assortment of electronic components.
- [2]: Rebuilt my personal website. I've been hoping to write more (mostly for my own sake). One of the things that was mentally impeding me from writing was being afraid of being incorrect. I like to learn, but I think I'm a slow learner and don't always get things right the first time around. However, I tend to usually figure it out. I think writing could help me through that process (and potentially other people that are learning as well), so I think it'll be easier if I approach my writing with that perspective. I built it using GatsbyJS and its hosted with Netlify.
Bread is lovely as are the green leaves shining during a beautiful day with clear, cool air in NY.
I’ve been writing and linking about flights from and to reality through art (usually videogames) at https://hypertexthero.com which is now published with a [static site generator][1] and no JavaScript other than [HTML Form File to Txt][2] to quickly create a text file for posting. The site design and format was inspired by Daring Fireball, and I aim to release it as a theme soon.
During this time I discovered [Focus Writer][3] which is open source, cross-platform, quite nice.
Hoping people will come up with fusion power and other climate crisis [solutions][4] during this time.
Peace out.
[1]: https://gohugo.io/ "Hugo — love the speed, hate the language syntax and some of the new defaults like .md extension instead of .txt"
Frustrated by the problem of information overload, I've been working on Sivv - https://www.sivv.io/ - a forum for sharing summaries of the most useful / actionable ideas from books, long-form articles and research. The idea is to boost the 'signal-to-noise' ratio of the information that people consume, helping them to both reduce the amount of time they spend reading while also learning more.
I just finished releasing a mobile game, and have a new goal for my next game: Early DOS 3D game based on the Rise of the Triad engine (a modified Wolfenstein 3D engine).
As far as I know the engine wasn't used again, with most moving to a Doom clone. I think there's untapped potential in the ROTT engine, and want to show it off, while having the game still run on the original target (386/486).
So far the code analysis has been really interesting, especially compared to the Wolf3D engine that it started as.
Thanks, I have that and the doom book (ROTT used the WAD format from Doom) and have been using it for reference. I asked the author if he had anything on ROTT and he said no but I can add an annex to the GEBB once I'm done lol
I've been working on a small project called https://CodeSnippetSearch.net. It allows you to search through code snippets using natural language. Currently, Python, Java, Go, Php, Javascript, and Ruby programming languages are supported. I think it's especially useful for new programmers because it allows you to search through code in a "Google-like" fashion. It also allows you to find similar code snippets to the ones found in search results. This enables you to explore different possible solutions.
As with any cool project nowadays, CodeSnippetSearch is powered by neural networks (six in fact - one for each programming language). The project is open-sourced and you can read about the implementation details here: https://github.com/novoselrok/codesnippetsearch This project started as a reimplementation of the models in the CodeSearchNet challenge by GitHub (https://github.com/github/CodeSearchNet/). I have reused their data and reimplemented the neural bag-of-words model in Keras. I didn't expect any improvements with my reimplementation, but I did manage to beat the baseline models by a little bit.
The search is still a bit of a hit-and-miss and I'm continually trying to improve it. If the match rating for the top result is below 50% it will most likely be irrelevant.
I shipped an MVP of an instant messaging app that re-imagines the dynamics of chat. Your conversation is no longer limited to the vertical direction. It can expand in the horizontal direction to separate different but simultaneous topics!
I also did a couple of Show HN posts for it. Didn't get much traction with either, but it's ok because I think my next steps are to revise the landing page and get a more proper UI.
I don't get it. Are you threading but just making threads side by side? The demo isn't making much sense because logically they could be all vertical.
And if you're just placing threads to the side, doesn't this require the main thread to be squeezed? I can't imagine this would look good on a phone except in landscape. But I haven't used landscape since I had a physical keyboard. Everything you have tells me this is what you're doing: a style change.
I think the demo needs a more clear example. What does it look like? The demo should make it abundantly clear what's happening and what your product solves. That's your 1 minute to get me hooked and read more. To get me to try it. New styles, even if more efficient, have more friction, because it is new and things aren't where you expect. Your demo needs to show that it is worth the friction.
Thanks for the feedback -- definitely agree on the demo! Based on some feedback from one of the Show HNs, I'm planning to make some fake little chat bot, so users have something to interact with (albeit in a very scripted/formulaic way) instead of sending a link to a friend. The chat bot will replace the static demo entirely.
It's definitely a style change first and foremost. I got sick of this pattern: friend sends message1, message2, message3; I respond reply1, reply2, reply3. And then they probably reply to some (if not all) of my replies. Usually it's pretty clear which message corresponds to which topic, but it's always messy. With XpanXn, it's explicit and visually obvious.
Each topic column is a fixed width. You can pan around the chat canvas and zoom in/out exactly as you'd expect! In fact, another motivator was knowing that a lot of people like really small font sizes on their phones. This way, you tailor font size just by zooming in/out. There's definitely some opportunity to improve that, but for now, I think the ability to pan tends to most of that concern.
1. Threads aren't secondary. There's no secondary window, and threads don't get lost in the amalgamation of main window messages. All threads are presented equally, which brings me to...
2. It's visual. You see the entire graph -- how the conversation flows -- and you directly interact with the chat canvas.
Trying to learn frontend so I can make myself a better to-do list/calendar app. I'm a robotics engineer so I have no idea what I'm doing, but it's fun. Due to executive dysfunction, I tend not to have a very good idea of how long it'll take me to finish anything longer than about a day's work (so I assume it "won't take that long", which fuels dangerous amounts of procrastination), so my concept was that each task gets broken down into subtasks that are small enough that I can estimate time for them. These time estimates then get propagated to the root task, and leaf-level tasks can be dragged and dropped into today's calendar (with other events pulled in from Google Calendar so I don't accidentally double-book myself). On the task itself I'll be able to record how much time (in pomodoros) it actually took to complete; in addition to tracking how I actually spent my time, hopefully this will help calibrate my future time estimates.
I also finished knitting a sweater -- my second overall, and first time not working from a pattern. I had to redo the yoke three times (the torso and front/back panels of the yoke are lace, so I wanted to integrate the decreases in the lace pattern), but I'm really satisfied with what I ended up with.
https://www.higifter.com/
It's an SMS-based chatbot that helps you remember special occasions (birthday, anniversary, mother's day), recommends gifts, and purchases them for you automatically.
Working on this with my girlfriend, mostly for fun and to learn something new. We're using Webflow for the site, Airtable as the backend, Zap to help stitch a few parts together, and Twilio for SMS support.
Maybe it's because I'm on mobile but I'm not seeing any images of the actual application. Personally when I work with an editor, me deciding to download it is heavily based on what it looks like. If I have to download it to see... I won't.
I completely understand. I'm in the process of rebuilding the UI - so I did not want to post "stale" screenshots. I really hope to have the new version of the app ready in less than a week, and then take a few screenshots and post them ;)
Having said that, in the near future (3-4 months), I will redesign the site. Already hired a team. It's really interesting how things your idea of what should be on the website changes as things shape up. So, it will be a redesign from the ground up - but for that, I need to have a few more features ready - and that will take tiiiiime :)
EDIT: I should have mentioned: this is Windows10 only for now. I may port it to other platforms assuming all goes well.
Easy, secure REST API for your SQL database (PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB supported). You pre-define queries and get REST endpoints for them with token authentication.
I build a lot of side projects and got tired of always having to setup an API backend for each one that I wanted to use an SQL database with, so I made Seamless.cloud for myself. Maybe it will be useful for others too?
I built a simple, community-maintained page that aggregates machine learning/data science competitions from across multiple platforms: https://mlcontests.com
I built a digital whiteboard that was a little better suited for 5-year-olds than the current crop for my mom to use with my youngest and my niece.
Figured out how to properly use the bread machine (making approx 1 loaf a day, currently have carrot cake going).
Currently working on a proof of concept for a desktop version of a web business I own.
8-year-old is super obsessed with primitive tech and has been digging up clay out of the back yard. I imagine we'll be making a kiln this weekend and eventually bricks.
I'm a magician who invents new technology at a FAANG.
I've started posting podcasts showing how I use the magician's toolset to invent new technology that's focused on doing the impossible in a way that meets users needs and dreams!
We live about about 30km outside of our capital city. It's a village, but you can see it slowly transforimg into a small town. Wife got crazy about growing own vegetables, so I've been busy assembling garden crates for her.
We also decided to farm chickens (for eggs), so we bought a havel - another couple of hours spent on assembling. As we never did this before, we are grokking the web looking for something you would call "chicken farming for dummies".
Since i was without a freelance project for 2 weeks when the lockdown started i finally took the time to build a chicken run and and a coop.
We wanted to do this for years and now that they are here i can say keeping chickens (we've got 6 hens) is one of the best things i ever did. They are very rewarding.
I think it is important to research what type of chicken is best suited for you. Ours are Jersey Giants, a so-called dual use breed. We keep them for eggs and meat, i'm used to the butchering part.
We let them roam freely for the most part of the day so they can hunt for bugs and snails. So far they don't mess up the garden too much...
We have four chickens for eggs and one rooster. They are about as easy an animal as you can have. If you have a fenced-in backyard you can let them roam around all day, they will eat all the bugs back there. This is good for as we live in southern Louisiana which provides a plentiful amount of bugs. They are also more resilient than you would think, in terms of the winter for you. You'll learn as you go, might lose one to a hawk as we did, and have to clean up the carcass.
I launched a side-project to manage all the domain names I've registered over the years. This service provides a simple DNS records manager, an email account that covers all the domains, auto-generates LE certs and either serves a single page HTML website or redirects to a Github repo page. No limit how many domains added to account. https://projectpending.com/
I've been working on my side project to remove the need to manually run website speed checks each time you make a performance tweak.
It's called PerfBeacon (https://perfbeacon.com/), and since quarantine started I've had time to add a free tier, test an implementation in Docker (rather than AWS Lambda), and start a couple of integrations with Netlify and Vercel.
I'm working full time, but when I'm not, I'm either working on a few board game designs I can playtest against myself, or working on an update to my Proximity 2 game that I released on Xbox 360 a long time ago.
Wasn't paying too close of attention to Monogame for the longest time, so the XNA code stayed dormant for years, but then I finally sat down to see how hard it was to port it to Monogame and I had it running in 24 hours. So I decided to sit down and rework and clean up the UI, upscale all the graphics (requiring me to remake them in Illustrator, since I originally made them in 720p in Photoshop), adding support for up to 6 players, support for localization to more languages, adding in-game achievements, adding new game modes (still trying to get a single player mode that feels good), support for larger maps, and recently trying to get socket programming working so I can add IP-based online multiplayer (maybe eventually with a server for a later release, we'll see).
Also debating switching the graphics to 3D, but that may be too much, and I'm not so confident I can rewrite shader code for each platform. I had trouble as it is getting a line effect I had in XNA working in Monogame on Windows.
Planning to release it on Windows and Mac first, and then expand out from there. Probably mobile (I released it once on iPhone but it was a port to Objective-C and that code is now ancient), then hopefully get it on the Nintendo Switch before the next console generation, then probably Playstation and Xbox.
Nothing too fancy, I have been writing/rewriting some of my personal libraries. I finally gave in and wrote an OpenGL abstraction, because dealing with shaders manually was such a pain. Now I am working on a simple GPU font renderer, which is hopefully easier to use than my earlier CPU rasterisation based approaches (no need to snap to pixel raster or to pack things into a texture, can deal with both small and gigantic letters).
Basically our hourses are 1-3 orders of magnitude dimmer than the outside; this is not good. Ben Kuhn's approach was to buy a big 30k lumen LED bulb for $100. I am doing a more DIY approach with a number of small LED COBs. Each finished module will output 13.5k lumens for a bit less than $100 (so multiple will be needed per room), but it comes with a number of benefits:
- The light is extremely high quality, almost the exact same as sunlight. Fluorescent bulbs and normal LEDs do not give off the full spectrum of visible light we get from the sun and incandescent bulbs. In fact I tried growing some plants indoors a while ago, and even though they were seemingly well-lit they ended up dying due to a lack of light.
- The light can be dimmed to warm. Each module has four LED COBs. Three are bright white and put out 13.5k total lumens. The other one is a warmer white which should be useful at night - like IRL flux/redshift. And these can all be dimmed smoothly from 100% to 1% brightness.
- The modules are controlled with an ESP8266, so they have WiFi. Aside from controlling them via a phone/computer, I am going to set up a Raspberry Pi running some timed scripts to automatically adjust them. For example they can all turn on in the morning as a natural wake up alarm (I have a separate alarm clock project I'm working on to give this a normal physical alarm clock interface). And I'm going to investigate using PIR sensors to make them automatically respond to human presence.
In the end this method is a bit more expensive than just buying high power bulbs (and more expensive than buying normal bulbs, but you would need like 70 of them in a room to match the total light output), but it has a number of seemingly useful advantages. Right now I'm working on the second (and hopefully final) prototype; the first was electrically OK but had thermal issues (LEDs still get very hot!).
It's an interesting break from normal software engineering. There's a huge emphasis on getting it right, and on getting it right the first time. Since there are a couple of amps of power running through the system, it needs to be well designed and safe from the very beginning. And $6 shipping every time you order from DigiKey punishes iteration heavily, since if you're making small iterations then your shipping will be much more expensive than the parts. I spent probably around 60 hours researching before making the first order. After finding out that the thermal solution was inadequate I spent a bunch of time theoretically fixing that and finishing up every single loose end (up to well over 100 hours total now). So now my second order will very likely result in a 100% complete, functional, and safe (I think!) product.
The only thing left is to design a lamp-style enclosure. The module is small enough to replace a lightbulb in an overhead socket, but the wiring would need to be changed slightly and working through a small hole in the ceiling is not really practical.
Most LEDs will quote a CRI value. There are 15 buckets of color which can be tested, but generally CRI will just be the average of the performance on the first 8 buckets only. You can see the colors of the buckets at [1] or [2].
Higher quality LEDs will quote their R9 performance. LEDs are most efficient at creating bluish light, and use a phosphor to even out the light. Many LEDs lack red light output, which is what the R9 bucket is for. However ideally you want great performance across the full spectrum.
The LEDs I'm using are the Bridgelux Thrive. If you look at page 7/9 (page numbers / actual PDF page) on their datasheet [3], they have actual graphs of the light spectrums. Two pages above that they have a table with R1-R15 measurements.
On the lower graph of page 7/9, the dotted line is a black body radiator at 4000 degrees kelvin. Basically hot stuff glows and the spectrum shifts depending on the temperature. Incandescent bulbs are around 2700 K and make a shitton of infrared plus a bit of red/yellow. The sun is at 6000-6500 K; while it still makes a lot of infrared the spectrum now covers the entire visible range and also some UV and shorter wavelengths.
They plot against that spectrums from what would qualify as 80/90/98 CRI. You can see the 80 CRI has a large falloff on the red (right) side of the spectrum. Bridgelux invents a new number Average Spectral Deviation which just computes how different the light is from the black body radiator; as you can see the Thrive is almost the exact same except for the very deep reds and a small blue bump / green dip (which is a characteristic of most LEDs, you can see the others have a much bigger deviation).
I was a bit surprised to see that the 98 CRI had such a huge deviation in the blue (seems it trades a bigger blue bump for a smaller green dip). I don't know how trustworthy the comparisons are, but at least the Thrive is damn near perfect.
However it's not very efficient, outputting 100-120 lumens per watt. Less-accurate emitters can get close to 200 lm/W. Also there's not a very big difference between the prices of different LEDs, and a different module would likely be a drop-in replacement. So you could nearly double the output of the system I designed if you didn't care too much about color rendering, which would make it somewhat competitive with the market in terms of $ per lumen. There's still a bit of soldering and assembly involved though.
Very cool project. I started taking notice at a lot of high end resorts at the things they do to make the environment relaxing. I came to believe that lighting was one of the biggest factors, with scent a close second. I am looking for dimmable recessed style leds to put in my home. I want to do quite a few more than usual so that each individual lamp can be dimmer. Have you come across any good quality led fixtures that are ready to install?
I haven't noticed any high power ones, but I wasn't specifically looking for them. I've heard Ubiquiti has some PoE stuff but no idea about quality.
For normal bulbs, the two good brands seem to be Philips and IKEA. Philips has their Hue system, which in addition to WiFi/Bluetooth cloud variants also have local ZigBee variants which don't need an external service to operate with full functionality. I've also heard good things about Ikea's software.
With normal bulbs there's no active cooling (fan). At least in the US they are sold as 60 watt equivalent (800 lumen, 8-9 watt) and 100 watt eq. (1500 lm, 15 watt). With the higher powered ones there is a good chance that the power supply will die to heat within a few months to years. Many brands have had issues with that, including IKEA. Philips still sells some of the higher powered ones; maybe they have some special system to ensure longevity. If you want to buy those it would be good to check if there are any bad reviews.
But basically from what I've encountered on the web about normal LEDs it seems you can't go wrong with or beat the higher-end Philips/IKEA bulbs.
That sounds great. Would love these in my office, where light is always terrible. I guess the power requirements rule out PoE as an option?
Have you given any thought to how this would affect privacy? Often the only reason why neighbours/passersby can't see you is because the outside is much brighter than the inside. I'd feel a bit awkward if I were in full view for the public, so to speak. And I'have to remember to put on clothes :-/.
Well if you're going to be keeping the curtains closed during the way, you might as well not bother installing windows. They're expensive and don't insulate very well. But yes, I see your point, and I feel a little silly for ignoring that obvious solution :O
Brilliant! I've been wanting to do something like this because of how disappointing the commercial options are. Any chance you could share your design details? Even something as simple as a GitHub repo with a Readme and any design files would be amazing!
Just put up a quick post: https://thepwner224.wordpress.com/2020/05/29/led-status/. A bit unorganized and not really edited; I haven't slept in a long time and just wanted to fill my notebook and also write this down before I forgot any details.
My first design was supposed to be around $70 and make 8k lumens, but was useless because I couldn't get away with the cheap thermal management I thought I could get away with. My second prototype which I just did was $105 and was supposed to make 13.5k lumens, but even after much planning it seems the thermal performance is inadequate. The third one will be $145 and will make 18k lumens, and I believe it will actually be able to work at max power without overheating. Luckily the lumen output is increasing too along with these price increases so they're not really price increases.
But I have to say, it's totally worth it. While it's not stable at 100%, I did run it at that for a bit and my initial reaction was 'this is a second sun.' In my workspace which went from 300 to 1500 lux it really made a difference in perception. I spent most of the time with sunglasses and still being blinded while trying to take temperature measurements, but at the end I stopped and just turned it on and looked around, and everything looked lit in a way it just hadn't before.
I'm working on a console-based RSS client in Haskell. The original plan was to implement the basic functionality of Newsboat (which currently is being rewritten from C++ to Rust).
It's still raw, but I already started using it as my primary RSS client. Right now it can fetch feeds, display them in a nice menu, maintain read status, open urls in a browser. The next features I'm going to add are support for configuration files (everything's hardcoded now) and tags + filtering.
--
Newsboat had a few problems inherent to C++ (like occasional segfaults) and the TUI library it used. Knowing about these, I started googling for alternatives written in a higher-level language. And spotted the announcement [1] of the Newsboat author, saying that he's going to rewrite Newsboat in Rust. When I read that, the rewrite was already going on for months with still no end in sight. I thought, "Heck! I can implement this in Haskell in a few days!" By now I spent about a week of full-time work on the project (spread over months), and got a bare working prototype.
My estimate was too optimistic, of course, I didn't foresee all the difficulties I encountered later and all the things I had to learn. But still, I think if I spend one more week on this, I can get a fully-featured and polished RSS client — Haskell makes programming a lot cheaper.
RSS feeds often contain the article text in HTML, and parsing webpages shouldn't be necessary. Kalina, like Newsboat, does support viewing these in terminal—I use Pandoc library to convert HTML to text, links and images are not preserved.
I don't know if fetching webpages and rendering them in terminal is a good idea. You can always use a terminal-based browser like w3m to open them. And I'm afraid most of such pages will be cluttered with animated popups and sidebars, filtering which will require some heuristics. Don't know it's worth it. But this is still something to look into in the future—at the moment there are more urgent things to do in Kalina.
Now that I don't have a commute anymore, I've been using the extra time to work on a full version of a game jam game I made a while ago and had good reception.
CaretakerDB: A property management solutions for caretakers and property managers. It's a management web app to keep track of properties, related information, contracts and billing.
It's still a work in progress, but I've gotten a lot done on it and looking forward to releasing it this Summer! You can check it out at https://caretakerdb.com if you want.
I launched a side project that allows you to run your customer's code from your app: https://www.lateral.run
I went back-and-forth at first on whether now's the time to launch a commercial side project like this, but with some uncertainty about the security of my VC-backed day job, I settled on this being precisely the time to have something of my own going.
That was exactly the inspiration, in fact. I've integrated Auth0 a few times and enjoyed the ability to drop down into code to tailor logic precisely to my needs.
I'm working on a turn-based rogue-like RPG. So no fancy graphics and such. Not sure if I will finish this project, but it's at least fun to work on and educational.
I also play a bit of Summoner [0]. Perhaps I can finally finish this game, which I couldn't when I played it a long time ago.
A multi host capable personal cloud computing platform. Using primarily existing technologies and influenced by the "Arch Way" (Simplicity, Modernity, Pragmatism, User centrality, Versatility) the design requires a small amount of technical attention and allows a wide range of functionality. To make it immediately useful, I'm creating a few simple applications and utilities: data, social, personal apps.
https://brewboard.app/ - shareable BrewBoards for home and craft brewers, right there on your nearest screen.
Initially hacked together the bones of this back in October lats year to fix frustrations with my chalk board (well, mainly with my writing and organization). Lockdown gave me the chance and impetus to focus in on this with lots of help from my awesome co-workers. We launched yesterday - but still have so much we want to add to this.
If you're a brewer (particularly if you use Brewer's Friend - since we already have an integration in place) please give it a try and send us your feedback. We want to take the chalk board to a new level. Oh, and here's my board: https://brewboard.app/boards/MGMvq-wZ1ks4
I've been working on an open source online database tool called Baserow [0] as a side project. In the current form you can compare it with a simple version of Airtable, but Baserow can handle much more data, you can optionally host it on your own server, you can write plugins for it and it's (going to be) open source. Everyone can try out an early test version at the website [0]. More features are going to be following soon! The open source release will probably take place in Juli as I still need to write lots of documentation and I want to create a plugin boilerplate.
The stack is Django, Nuxt.js and PostgreSQL (also MySQL and SQLite are going to be supported). For this project I've been learning Nuxt.js and Kubernetes. Normally I work full time as a full stack freelance developer, but due to the corona outbreak I've lost one of my biggest clients. This resulted in more time for Baserow, which was already a side project for a while now. I would like to make a business out of this in the future because I really enjoy working this.
I've been trying to get into AI/ML/Deep learning because I feel like it will broaden the types of side projects I can undertake. I have one project in mind which involves analyzing written communication.
I've looked online for resources and I've found a bunch of Youtube videos that go over the high level concepts:
For reference, I have 0 AI/ML/DL experience but I having been coding for awhile and I'm familiar with Python. These videos are quite long but I plan to start building a small toy app to validate my understanding. I'm just not sure if I'm taking the best approach to learning these concepts. I want to start working with the various tools ASAP because I believe that I learn better by doing.
As an Android developer, it was hard for me to find a place to copy & paste deeplinks on a device that didn't have Slack. So, I created a lightweight Android app that allows you store any time of link and open it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appdex
I've been building https://www.contact-stack.com as a way to get regular reminders to stay in touch with friends who live in other cities & countries.
It is my first attempt at a product/business and has been a good learning experience. Also a good excuse to have Elixir & Phoenix a good. Long story short, I like them but miss types.
I've decided to learn Python by dabbling in some Django to wite a cms. I'm simply amazed at how quickly you can get something usable with so little experience.
Probably a dime a dozen project compared to most things posted here, but it has an eventual use case for me, and it's fun :)
My wife wrote the story, and we worked with an illustrator to get the book to where it is now. They’re mentioned at the end of the book - Gustyawan Studio.
It's a week old now and I have around 2000 services listed.
This services rose from my own need to understand how to build something as cheap as possible. Working on this gave me the understanding how many services gives you a free plan which is good enough to solve a problem you care.
Over the past few years I've been on the hunt for a good tool to help me manage my projects. Trello, Jira, I've tried a bunch and yet still couldn't pin point why none of the tools worked well.
The quarantine forces me to think about it even more, and I think I've found the why, and how.
Looks very interesting, I've been playing with similar ideas, but everytime I come back to the thought of 'But somebody must have built this already'. I'm really curious to try a prototype of this, so I signed up to the list. The sketches/screenshots look good, keep up the good work.
Can you please add Treenga to comparison? It is more like simple issue tracking, so very far from, say, Jira, but may work as a replacement for Trello for simple task management. This is my recent project, would be happy if you share your feedback.
Quarantine has made me realise how little free time I actually have. I am supposed to be doing a basic database for a friends lab. It's turning out to be mainly a data validation and cleaning project. Without a cycle to work, a cycle back from work to split up my day I have really little motivation to sit more hours coding after I have cooked dinner and eaten. I should get on with it though.
Doing: lifting myself to hell and back and jump rope.
Building: Making maze generators in minetest (before moving them to minecraft)
And trying to figure out if I can find a function that takes two finite consecutive sequences with length N and M of natural numbers, which start by 1 (E.g [1,2,3], but not [1,2,4,5]) and give back a sequence which contain all the numbers starting from 1 up to the NxM, but not necessarily sorted without using the size of the sequences. So I want to number the cross product of the two sequences.
This crap is related to some programming problem I hit.
t = {1,2,3...} -- <- can be lenght
s = {1,2,3,4...} <- can be any length
xs = {}
for i,h in ipairs(t) do
for j,k in ipairs(s) do
q = f(i,j) -- <- I want to know if f is possible
to write
xs[q] = h * k
end
end
Well the answer is I think no, but I found some functions that work up to a certain number or that work within certain bounds, so how far we can stretch that? And of course it works for the whole set of natural numbers.
Pretty sure the answer is no as a math problem where f is pure. If f returns the same answer each time, the square ending at N,N contains [1, N * N]. Then the rectangle ending at N,N+1 must contain (N * N, N * (N+1)] in the nonoverlapping strip. Ditto for N+1,N. But then for N+1,N+1 all other locations must contain low numbers and there's only a single corner cell left which can contain the rest of the missing numbers between (N(N+1), (N+1)(N+1)]. Unless I made a mistake I don't think any function would work here for N > 1. What were the examples you found?
OTOH as a programming problem you can just cheat and store state somewhere to count the row width. This satisfies your interface requirements (python):
lastJ = None
def f(i, j):
global lastJ
if i != 0:
return i * (lastJ + 1) + j
else:
lastJ = j
return j
N = 3
M = 5
seen = set()
for i in range(N):
for j in range(M):
q = f(i, j)
seen.add(q)
assert sorted(seen) == list(range(N * M))
I am on work, so can't access my home laptop. But this problem is related to pairing functions (but those work for the whole domain of the naturals). It means you need to find a function that walks the numbers in a nice way, like seen here: http://szudzik.com/ElegantPairing.pdf
I think it isn't possible to find a function that works for arbitrary sequences. I know there is a function that works if the sets have the same size (n is size), it is trivial why those work. They have the form n^0 a + n^1 b, where a,b are in [1..n]:
f :: Integer -> (Integer,Integer) -> Integer
f n (i,j) = i + (j - 1)*n
-- For example:
f 3 <$> ((,) <$> [1..3] <*> [1..3])
[1,4,7,2,5,8,3,6,9]
Now I want to find functions like (n,m is size, n /= m):
f n m (i,j) = ..
And functions where n maybe chosen but m is between certain bounds. I have found a couple of those by mutilating pairing functions.
I know I can use a counter, but I don't like cheating :p
I need to draw your reasoning on a paper to see it or take some time for it. Little bit busy, working from home, having the kids and stuff :p
Pretty cool. Did you bake the viz yourself? How does it work.. Can you explain a bit how you handle the sheer scale of it. And how the nodes are positioned - I can't imagine it is some sort of graph node attraction/repulsion algorithm as it will kill the server? Do you precompute?
tl;dr: wrote scripts to parse wikipedia dump, used LargeVis (https://github.com/lferry007/LargeVis) to layout the graph, wrote further scripts to generate tiles, tiles in layers up to a specific zoom level are saved as files and served directly by nginx, closer ones are generated dynamically by flask, which also handles querying for the closest node to the mouse position efficiently with https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.s...
SaaS for creating, editing and publishing audio content for global audiences http://narrationbox.com/. Still building a ton of features into it like audio widgets for news sites and blogs, audio editor. Basically making it end-to-end for audio content creators. Also reading Elon Musk's biography.
I've been writing a 3D engine from scratch, which has been really interesting since it's well outside of my normal professional software experience. My goal is to make a game with it for the upcoming Playdate console.
So far only a few people know about it and some of my friends are using it, but my goal is to keep it running and use it myself even if nobody else ends up using it. It is very cheap to operate and I use it as my own personal bookmarking and media upload service. Beware: work in progress!
When I need to make money: I code and build hardware. But when work is slow and my brain can wonder, I find myself wanting to tell stories with video. The sad part is I am not Casey Neistat.
Here is a video that the whole family worked on for a school project a few weeks ago: https://youtu.be/QHmkRBIzUMs
Same here. Raising kids, cooking, cleaning and working is more than enough.
After two months (Spain) we now have the right to go for a walk every day with the kids. This has improved things.
During the hard lockdown (no right to go outside with kids) I had very bad days (stress, anxiety, etc.), which affected my kids (they became angry aggressive, something that I had never seen in them) and with help from a psychologist I learned to calm myself down and now things are fine again.
I guess that my side project has been to learn about my own psychology and how it affects my family, and to learn to deal with all that.
I feel I should be pushing the schooling and learning harder, but my wife is leaning hard into their emotional well being first. And watching my middle daughter teach our youngest how to say "i feel" during an argument and not "you did" means I need to back off. I might even be growing as a parent too.
Have a two year old who is wants constant attention.
Typical day is I take the morning shift. Wife does the afternoon shift and I again do the evening shift.
Once the toddler goes to bed at 8 pm, we both work (typically past midnight)
What makes this very challenging is that
a) Kid wants attention continually so there is no point in trying to do any work while it is my turn.
b) We live in an apartment complex and folks who live downstairs have called cops on our kid multiple times for running around. This despite the fact that he never does during "queit hours (sleeps from 8 pm to 7 am)" and these noises are protected by SF tenant laws. Couple of weeks back a SF police officer knocked on our door and tried to arbitrate. Internally, I wanted to slam the door in the cop's face though I was respectful.
c) Because of (b) kid knows that we are very sensitive about him running around. So anytime he feels he is not getting attention, he will run or stomp on the floor.
It sucks living in an upstairs apartment with kids. Bad enough getting them up to the apartment with whatever you're carrying, worse having bad neighbors below.
Have you tried introducing yourself, or maybe leaving an apology/explanation note with contact information. Downstairs it probably feels like they are screaming into the void whenever there is noise, they might have a kid trying to take a nap or something that you can compromise about. There also might be certain noises that seem small to you but are more irritating to them.
Honestly, the only good downstairs (or upstairs) neighbor I ever had was a mostly deaf older woman.
My kids want a lot of attention too. Well, my oldest either wants attention or spend the entire day playing Minecraft and watching Youtube, so it's up to us whether we want to enforce screen time limits or not.
The youngest is 5 and he's a handful, so we got our babysitter to help us three days of the week. She lost all her jobs and has no income otherwise, and for us it means we can work normally 3 days a week, so everybody wins.
But he's also finally getting better at playing alone. (He used to be great at that when he was 3, less so more recently.) It's also a matter of managing the expectations of your kids, I guess.
I've had downstairs neighbors like this: we were quiet, responsive and tried our best not to make a racket. My wife and I were out of the house most of the day, but they kept on calling the cops on us.
They were assholes, and talking to them didn't help. I can't say we were too broken up when he died of a coronary and she moved out of the building.
I completely agree, I have 4 kids and a full time job. Helping them with their homework all day is a full time job as it is. My teams manager has noticed a reduction is everyone’s productivity; due to kids, mental health, stress, etc and has been quite forgiving so far as long as we’re clearly getting work done.
I have two kids (3 and 7) and we both work ... with multiple work meetings .. zoom based school ... homeworks ... managing fights between the kids ... and endless cooking and cleaning .. leaves me with very little time ... I told my team at work that I am at 10% of my productivity and they have been extremely supportive ...
Having a child running while you try to solve something or in a video meeting sure doesn’t help.
But in the time I had I’ve been able to make my child a simple drawing app for the iPad as many of them are too complicated or too formed. Hope to finish it and releasing though.
I definitely get that. We were pretty lucky - we were able to bring in a babysitter in the morning which was really helpful (still allowed here in IL).
Also when our first child was born my wife and I had a business together so we had a routine from then that we could fall back on.
It's really hard, but it mostly involves insane levels of cooperation - and giving each other equal times to work and take care of the kids.
The one thing that would have made our lives much easier would have been a way to share office calendars (different companies) so that if either one of us had a meeting at any given time it was booked off for the other one.
same.
I have a bunch of things I'd love to do like others seem to be (whats this "free time" thing?), but I get kids organised, work, get dinner ready, sleep. my only real "down time" is taken up by an hour of predawn cycling atm
Since all gyms are closed in my country, I've converted my attic in a "make shift" gym. I've placed a desk, installed Ubuntu on an old laptop, placed a screen, put down a mat and some dumbells and just watch cardio and resistance workouts on YouTube. It's a great way to keep myself in shape and to break the day because I work from home all days.
I'm doing something similar. In normal times, I go to the gym every day or two and work out for an hour and a quarter. Since I'm now home all day, I've been doing bodyweight and dumbbell workouts next to my desk for fifteen or twenty minutes several times a day. They break up the monotony and refresh my mind for the next round of work. I also fit in extra exercise during Zoom meetings that I only need to listen to.
The result has been that I am staying in shape despite being indoors all day. The staggered workouts may be more effective at building muscle than my usual gym sessions, too.
The greatest benefit of the exercise, though, is the mood elevation.
Been using for years for my freelance/consultant activity a bash-based environment with convenience enhancements: create context per client or project, get instant access to auto-created per-context-day working directory with easy navigation, per context environment + bash_history + logging of terminal content + ability to instantly create/edit timestamped files for note taking.
Good productivity booster, helps a lot isolate clients, easily answer customer phone calls any time. Logging saved me a few times.
Been wanting for a long time to rewrite it into something usable by others. Been doing that rewrite during lockdown.
All this reuses existing tools and conventions, is lightweight, shell-completion friendly, easy to learn.
Also, written (again) a game for the 8bit computer Amstrad CPC of 1984, in clean modern C on a C compiler that understands most of C11. With optimized assembly for time-critical parts.
Both started earlier this year, got more time during lockdown.
I might offer a "show HN" for one or both. If you have any interest please tell.
Will you go to the "fire and forget" route of hoping I do some "Show HN" and be unaware in between, or will you provide some way to notify you?
Especially, since the thing is rewritten but partially modular I have started asking around me what features are most wanted, so that I can start the modularity effort in areas that make most sense. I've been considering an online poll. Will you participate? How to reach you?
I am rebuilding the "framework" I wrote for doing my MSc dissertation on the classification of fake reviews. Now that I have the time, the code is far better organized and the higher level structure pretty clean in that I can copy a module, customize it a bit and now a different feature set can be generated. Churning out different ensembles should be fairly easy as well. And of course I'm throwing dask, mlflow and dvc into the mix...
I don't really need to do this (ought to be looking for a job...) <and I'd rather write code than pay to use someone else's SaaS>
but now that I have quite a number of different review datasets to play with, a framework that lets me spin up 10+ processes across the 5 machines I have at my disposal will make short work of most the sets. I will need the uni's HPC cluster to deal with the Amazon dataset, though. Using dask will surely help with that.
Then it's writing yet another paper... Not being allowed to go outside is rather motivating.
A movie recommender (item-item) that recommends movies similar to a proposed movie. The similarity is based on tags, specifically the tag genome created by GroupLens.
This is mostly because I have a personal need for this and I would like alternatives to existing movie recommendation services, but I may make it available online if time permits.
A second step would be to introduce an example critiquing aspect, allowing for interactions like "show me movies similar to 'Crimson Peak' but with less horror".
All of this is based on the MovieLens 25M dataset and an accompanying article (http://files.grouplens.org/papers/tag_genome.pdf) describing a recommender called 'Movie Tuner' that is no longer available.
It will be fun to tune the recommendations based on my own preferences. For example I don't need an algorithm to suggest movies that have the same actor/director.
We found many of the virtual office tools too invasive for our tastes both physically with video emphasis and virtually by commanding a lot of attention. So we built a group intercom system that stays out of your way but gives you seamless comms when you need it. https://www.squawk.to
I rented a server from Digital Ocean, installed nginx and Go, and wrote a web server. No frameworks on the front or backend, just HTML, CSS, and a couple of small scripts. And I wrote my own authentication and admin pages to manage everything from the browser.
On the side I run my project https://fitnessmodern.de/ about showing people what you can do with modern wearables. When the corona crisis started in Germany I thought: ok, this could be the end for the project. Who is going to leave his apartment now to keep fit or to buy a new gadget.
But exactly the opposite happened. After a sharp collapse in visitor numbers in the first days of the crisis, they shot up again. More than I knew from before. That was astonishing but in retrospect logical: because here in Germany there was no real curfew, only a ban on contact with other people. So people probably thought: before I lounge around at home, I'll do something for my health and fitness. You can also tell from other comments here that fitness projects have worked. That motivated me to do my project even more intensively, because I realized that it is important to people.
WeHero Home: A browser extension to donate money using ad revenue you gain just from browsing the web. Been working on it for some time but quarantine has allowed me to work on it more than I expected! https://www.wehero.co/browser-extension/
I am making a self hosted or maybe hosted website where you can just import youtube/your videos and you get a link to a podcast feed. None of the existing ones worked for me and I like to listen podcasts before sleeping, and there are a lot of channels which don't need the video part.
It's not public yet, but let me know your thoughts about the idea.
I definitely could use something like this! Or more specifically, something that will take a channel's RSS feed and convert it to the podcast format for my podcatcher.
I used to work at a tech giant, where the data team relies a lot on native Spark in Scala. I've always found the combination quite pleasant to work with. However, I did miss Python's faster startup time, dynamism and REPL, especially when doing data cleaning and exploration with no intention of putting it in production.
Now that I'm doing my own thing at a much smaller scale, I naturally gravitated towards Python's data stack, namely NumPy, Pandas, Sklearn and Dask. However, I found myself missing Spark's consistent SQL API and performance!
So yea, I've been wanting to use more Clojure for work and set up a Clojure shop. During the quarantine, I find myself having more time to do focused work. I thought this would be a good opportunity to convert some of the data wrangling stuff to Clojure!
I'm a CPA working as an external auditor for public companies filing 10-K financial statements. Looking for a job in public accounting is hard because audit firms do not have many differing characteristics. The one thing that is different is their clients. Clients are required to disclose their auditor, but obtaining a list of clients by firm/location is very hard.
My app uses public government data to plot US public companies on a map, and includes details on the firm that most recently audited their annual financial statements.
The data sources are:
1. a listing of all Form APs filed to the PCAOB (auditor-client relationship data),
2. SEC company data from the Corpwatch API database
3. Google search API for company locations
I only had a few courses in college concerning analog circuits, but if you understand the principles, it's easy to learn from the schematics available on the internet.
So far I've been exploring the use of MOSFETs - I found that the 2N7000 transistor is as cheap and abundant as BJTs, so I'm using it.
This type of transistor is less predictable and has a more complex working principle than a BJT, but with that come additional possibilities.
My last non-idiomatic-but-working design is a MOSFET-based A-class buffer that maintains an optimal operating point using a BJT differential amplifier as a comparator for the feedback loop, maintaining the DC output before the coupling capacitor at exactly half the supply voltage.
It's not linear, but that's the idea - if you plugged in a guitar to it the difference wouldn't be really noticeable, but doing the same with a bass should give a "sweeter", enriched with low harmonics tone.
Work in progress, but a couple of friends and me are making an online chat for small groups of people - just a quick place to have a random conversation, although if you come back we try to put you back with the same people if available
I often see an idea that help solve a problem that I was stuck. A few days ago, people start to shares those ideas that helped them, so I created Inspired Ideas that you can learn from other experiences
I'm helping out with a program for students (myself being one of them) that lost their summer internships due to the pandemic, called Summer of Shipping. Currently looking for more student builders and experienced mentors to grow out our initiative, but we've gotten some great numbers of both so far and want to reach as many people as possible. We're a pretty nice group and we've had a lot of great conversations so far in our comms channel. Open to developers of non-traditional backgrounds too.
Meetings are every Thursday for demos, presentations and networking over Zoom. We're currently on Week 3 but our doors are open to anyone at any point. We accommodate both people who prefer to work individually or in groups! :)
I'm trying not to spend more time in front of the computer since I'm still doing it all day but at home now.
I've started cooking, I knew how to cook basic things and basically feed myself but I'm following a lot of Kenji Lopez-Alt on youtube and it's really been motivating me to try something different that might take a little more skill or time that I wouldn't have tried before. https://www.youtube.com/user/kenjialt
If you're trying new things, I'd recommend making gumbo. Really tasty, teaches you how to make a good dark roux, and otherwise is relatively easy. Isaac Toups has good videos out there on how to.
We've launched a series of challenges ( 30 riddles and puzzles) themed around a guy named Larry who is in quarantine with his pet hedghehog, for people stuck at home to complete!
https://www.lockdownwithlarry.com
This seems promising! I'm usually decent at puzzles but am stuck on the first one and don't have enough confidence in the puzzle quality to donate to see the first hint.
- Baking bread, brewing beer, making Kimchi and stews... these things that take time but have such tasty results.
- Re-learning feedback control and linear algebra, then implementing them in C++.
- Learning to fully maintain my road bike: replacing the chain, gears, shifter cables, etc. I still don't like dirty hands.
It's a communication platform for small and micro businesses (spec. emerging markets) to send invoices and orders, keep track of credits/debits, log income/expenses, trade commodities, sell online, chat with customers and suppliers.
I am taking the learnings of okcredit, khatabook (digital ledger in India), bijak, procol (trading in India), choco, rekki (restaurant ordering from their suppliers) to what I believe is the final consequence of an integrated chat app to run small businesses.
I used MessageBird for sms notification of new messages, SendGrid for email and Firebase Auth for login.
Self hosted home automation with Home Assistant [1] I haven't done a ton with it lately, but ended up finally updating an integration with it. Which lead me to learn more python async (still beginning this), github actions, and dev containers in VSCode [2].
My actual integration is for a WattBox, IP controlled power conditioner and UPS. Because apparently I am the only person to write an API wrapper for it. [3]
I'm building a freely available data set from a 50000 student survey of attitudes towards experimental physics. Typically this kind of data is never available without working at the institution where it's gathered. We figured that's BS and really against NSF guidelines for data collection anyways.
I made https://taaalk.co - it is quite like debubble (also in this thread). It's a platform for online discussions. It's not focused on debating, but on exploring topics and sharing knowledge.
You can create a Taaalk and invite any number of people to join it using an invite link and code. If you don't have anyone to Taaalk with you can leave your details on the Start a Conversation page.
Some friends and I started it a few years ago and then stopped, so I thought I'd rebuild it during quarantine.
I'm stuck on a small island in St. Vincent & the Grenadines after narrowing escaping the nationwide lockdown in Venezuela, so I've been learning to kitesurf.
I've been working on a function generator for my own personal use! I can get sine, square, and triangle waves out of it, and I'm just starting to implement modulation schemes like PSK and FSK.
I'm also just starting to help my fiance launch a consultancy on remote teaching. Crossing my fingers that goes well!
Inspired by article in Private Eye as well as a need to improve my own mental health during lockdown. Not only have I done five portions of fun a day. I wrote an app/website to help anyone journal Five Fun Things a day.
I've been experimenting with a programming language[1] on and off. The goal is to target the Go runtime, though I'm mostly still playing around with concurrency options.
I started an open-source project in Python called Restless, to get more experience in both NLP / ML and security. Restless is anti-malware that's "always watching" (every time a file is modified or created, it's automatically sent to the classification pipeline, which uses a hierarchical attention network trained with PE header data).
Right now I'm trying to figure out how to speed things up with multiprocessing (Keras doesn't play nicely with that). It's definitely a proof-of-concept project as opposed to something that's a enterprise-level tool (otherwise probably wouldn't write it in Python heh). Mostly I just wanted to make a sick-looking CLI for once.
Anyway my quarantine side project has been my little SVG icon manager that let's you easily "batch" update color and size for icon sets and then drag, copy or export them to whichever format you want.
I am working on my open source app [1] which allows shop owners to keep track of number of people in their shop, whilst also generating interesting analytics insights for later use.
I've built https://TimeForMe.today, a search engine for well-being sessions taking place online. From Yoga and Meditation to Taekwondo or and Dance. The website is free and many of the sessions listed are also free.
I redesigned my blog and started writing again during the quarantine. I've also run a clean install on my Mac because it couldn't boot for some reason. One valuable lesson I learned during the clean install was to set up the development environment correctly. I should've realized that most people don't understand Unix directory structure. As a result, they run `sudo` if something doesn't work.
Learning viola. I've been thinking about it off and on for a few years.
I got a very cheap one off Amazon, and only through dint of my prior musical experience (bass 10 yr ago, violin 30 yr ago), was able to put it into a decently playable shape.
It's a lot of fun, but VERY hard! New physical skills, learning a new clef.
I've built a web app called COVID-19 vs Markets which shows the effects of COVID-19 on the stock market overtime. Ended up writing a chart library from scratch! https://covid-19-vs-markets.now.sh/
I built an electron app for organising and watching saved movies. In my part of the world, a lot of people still rely on external storage devices to share movies and music.
Work continues, seeing the kids a lot more. Reading all sorts of programming books and having a go on Rust with something simple but helping in my daily workflow.
https://crates.io/crates/mgit
It's a simple site that features some links you might find handy during the lockdown. I've tried to put together a list that doesn't feature obvious choices.
I used Vue w/ Gridsome, it's hosted on GitHub with Netlify handling deployments. Honestly, it's been a dream to develop on. Gridsome is very user friendly, and I learned about GraphQL while making it (something I'd been meaning to learn about for a while) Using Netlify and having 'git push' automatically kicking off a build and a deploy without me having to do anything else has been so convenient. I'm definitely going to use a similar stack in the future.
Decided to finally start a blog, it's slow going and I'm a total n00b at advertising myself but I've always wanted to provide entry-level programming/cybersecurity training to people. I started a blog over at Medium (https://medium.com/@thecyberbasics) and a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/TheCyberBasics) and a twitter (@BasicsCyber). So far it's slow going, but I enjoy making it so that matters more. I realize the "get started with programming" arena is already slam packed, but I'm hoping someone will find my interpretation useful.
It's an open source, simple (all metrics on one page), lightweight (1.4 KB), no cookies (no need for cookie banner) and no private data collected (no need for GDPR consent) alternative to Google Analytics.
Could you comment on how you achieve GDPR compliance without the need of me getting a user consent from my visitors? I was always assuming that using a hosted solution like Plausible for analytics will at least result in the visitor IP address leaking to the service provider ... and for this I'd need consent if including your script?
Here's how we've done it. There's no legal precedent but we believe this makes us compliant:
To enhance the visitor privacy, we don’t actually store the raw visitor IP address in our database or logs. We run it through a one-way hash function to scramble the raw IP addresses and make them impossible to recover.
To further enhance privacy, we add the website domain to the IP hash.
Thanks. Had a lot on your site before posting, but didn't find that details. Perhaps you should add a link/hint on the frontpage regarding how you address GDPR compliance. (I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not qualified to judge on the solution.)
Thanks for the feedback. We link to it from the top menu under "Why Plausible" as "GDPR / CCPA Compliant" but perhaps there could be a better placement for it. Thanks again!
I'm working on what I'm calling a "provenance server" that tracks the
spread of information. It's a little hard to explain.
In my notes I wrote "better Twitter" and "no bullshit".
Rather than track people surreptitiously it's completely public and
voluntary. It allows for feedback to let people "+1" items on several
dimensions (basically a big bag of emotional adjectives) and I want to
rank the "truthiness" of facts, from physical laws and math (at one end)
to opinion and interpretation at the other, with a (metaphorical)
low-pass filter for BS and crap.
All information on the network is public, there is no walled garden or
silo. The idea is to think things out together, in public,
avoiding repetition and noise.
As a full-time Asana[0] user with Bitbucket[1] (and Github[2]) I am missing so many features with regards to connecting these two services. Meet Astogi.com[3] which essentially does the following:
1) Automatically generate unique task IDs for all created tasks. (e.g. TA-12)
2) On push in Bitbucket/Github, post a notification in the Asana task that is mention in the commit message. (e.g. Changed login form to fix TA-12)
If anyone is interested hit me up! I'm in dire need of some good feedback. :)
I've been learning Blender. Started with Blender Guru's doughnut tutorial then branched out from there. Made a simple virtual pet game where I made all the art myself. I ended up also downloading LMMS to make my own theme song for the game. It's been pretty fun.
I've been focusing on re-making my various Web party games into a more unified platform at https://jklm.fun/
The previous iterations were built years ago using CoffeeScript, Grunt/Gulp, Jade, Stylus, etc. This time around, I went for vanilla HTML/JS/CSS, no transpilation, no bundler, no build step at all (and no frameworks). It's been a joy. I'm using the TypeScript compiler in VS Code for sanity checking and might add some JSDoc to leverage the type checks even, but for now it's quite nice as is.
I've also enjoyed building up a Discord community for it all, got almost a thousand people in there now and it's a lot of fun interacting on a daily basis.
I live in Germany where the actual lockdown was way less severe than most other EU countries, especially in my region (which on the other hand had a very small of cases).
I did get some extra time because one of the few things that were actually closed down was my Aikido dojo. But mostly I exploited the fact that friends in Italy and Belgium could not go out at all and... I started an online RPG campaign using Discord as a platform and Mini-six for the rules.
We are having a blast - I hope that the players will like enough to keep playing even after they get back to a more normal schedule in their life (me, as the GM, I have done some up-front investment in preparing lots of content and so I think I will be able to run it even when I go back to 3/week practice).
Which e-bikes have you been looking at? I've ridden the Trek Powerfly and the YT Decoy and they're both exactly like what you're looking for. They only add to your output and in proportion to it. I also have a Raleigh cruiser e-bike and it works the same way. I was under the impression that all but the cheapest class 1 bikes work the same. I have ridden a couple rear hub drive bikes like the Rad Rover and they have a more "on or off" feel. The motor starts as soon as you start pedalling at whatever power setting you have selected
Thanks for your comment! I have tried the Rad Bikes and I had the exact same feeling like you. No cadence assist for me.
I looked at all the bikes you have suggested, and sadly none fit the bill. I didn't think they would - I have studied the subject extensively.
1. All popular mid-drive motors such as Bosch and Shimano are designed for European market, capped 250 watts, sometimes 350 watts. The max legal in the US is 750 watts, and I really want the max. I might even need the max when bike packing, or simply climbing up the hill where I live (it's pretty bad).
2. All legal powerful motors are rear-hub or front-hub. They can't take advantage of the rear wheel gearing, so they can't climb the hills. Rad Bikes have it written in the instructions that one must not use max assist when climbing uphill.
3. One can find non-street legal motors (how about 3000 watt) and they will climb rather well without gearing, but I want to stay within the law and conserve battery power. They are also heavy, and I might need to carry my bike on stairs.
4. There is a handful of street-legal powerful mid-drive motors, but they are mostly use on custom builds (Bafang, Tonsheng, etc), and even then only some of them seem to support torque sensors.
Then there are other concerns: it's nearly impossible to find full-size folding mountain bike, they are all 20" tire size. The $4k+ tag is about twice as much as I am planning to spend. Most of the bikes have rear shocks (stealing power - see "bike bobbing").
Generate a unique whiteboard and share with a friend to see it in action.
We were struggling to conduct software architecture interviews since going remote at my job because we no longer had a whiteboard, so I built InterviewBoard to fix this. I've been surprised by the ways people have used it. I originally anticipated people would only use it for software architecture, but data scientists have also told me they find it very useful. I'm still currently allowing as many free whiteboards as you want. Hope you find it useful! If you have any feedback I'd appreciate it at aking@interviewboard.io
Hey Cesar, that's great to hear. Mind shooting me an email at aking@interviewboard.io? Would love to run through some questions to get product feedback if you have the time.
I started selling make-at-home frozen dog treats: https://coopersdogtreats.com/. It's pretty sweltering here in San Diego, so I wanted to make frozen treats for my dog, but all the recipes online are mainly yogurt (which he hates) or peanut butter (which I use to feed him his flea pills, so he flees when he smells it now).
I started by putting some freeze-dried meat into a food processor until it became a dust, then I started adding some other ingredients for flavor/smell/consistency. I was really happy with the results, so I thought I'd try selling them! So far just a few sales, but I haven't done much marketing to this point.
It's my first book, and I have to fight a lot of impostor syndrome to give nontechnical advice (because its context dependent and who am I to give it). But the feedback for my prior writing indicates there's some sort of demand for this, and I do believe that the "soft skills" side of early dev careers aren't talked about enough.
There's a lot of "break into tech" and then "go from engineer to engineering manager" content out there. I'm trying to fill the space in between. We'll see how it goes... aiming to launch June 1st.
Bought a digital piano and started learning piano from scratch. Been trying out different software for learning piano using MIDI input. (Simply Piano, Playground Sessions, Flowkey, Piano Marvel).
Sorted and deduplicated all my photos.
Set up backups for all my important stuff using Restic to BackBlaze B2.
Simply Piano was pretty fun but the Android version is lacking in features. I connected a Roland FP-30 to my Samsung Note 10 using a OTG adapter and it works just fine. I also had some issues getting audio without using the phone speakers since there is no minijack and Bluetooth latency was unacceptable.
I tried Playground sessions and Flowkey only briefly but I liked the UI in Piano Marvel better. Also Piano Marvel doesn't require your credit card to get a free demo.
I ended up with Piano Marvel and a Windows laptop. What I like is that it's just sheet music. Very good for training rhythm and tempo. The UI is a clunky and buggy SPA, but it works. Biggest con is that the music is pretty bad. Simply Piano has licensed tons of popular music while Piano Marvel has mostly free and classical music.
A good friend and I have been making meditation seats for people that are inflexible and struggle to sit cross legged. It’s been going really well! https://www.practicemeditation.co
I've been working on my sideproject BitPull, a browser automation tool. You can create pretty complex workflows with it to extract data or just automate things in general.
https://bitpull.io
As the name suggests, this web app is meant to help groups of friends play some common party games (Cards Against Humanity, Taboo, Poker, etc.) over Video Chat.
I've been trying to build a medical dictionary app in the Bengali language. I want to make that knowledge accessible to Bengali speakers that don't speak English. Hard part has been finding someone to translate drug information from English to Bengali.
I’m an engineer exploring “the dark side” and saw a lot of classmates losing internships because of covid.
Contrary to the bad rap I feel that MBAs get amongst hackers, I’ve been pleasantly surprised how kind, scrappy, and effective my classmates are when applied to the right work “around the tech” e.g. marketing, running numbers, and fuzzy stuff that is important as companies grow.
Grew larger than we expected to a lot of other schools.
One disappointment: I wanted to call it “Hire the Dark Side,” but couldn’t find a single MBA who understood the joke!
I've started to make a simple website where people can share useful snippets of code, handy Linux commands or just anything useful regarding code. Urbandictionary-wise you can view topics, or go to a random snippet. Probably use this as a personal fun wiki
I made https://lostjourneys.live, a virtual bot that road-trips around the world in Google Street View and broadcasts its journeys, because I want to travel and see the world so badly!
Creative writing website for people to write silly hyperfiction novels together. It's closed beta, but over the last month a handful of us have written about eighty chapters totaling about the length of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. We're slowly looking for more writers that like doing round-robin-ish fiction like that. The site ends up owning the content but it's doubtful it will ever end up truly publication quality - it's mostly about just the fun of riffing off each other's submissions. The first version of the site existed almost 25 years ago so there are a lot of in-progress stories, I just brought it back to life with updated tech because of the virus.
I am working mainly on TeXnicard [0]. While not yet complete, I have made a lot of progress in writing it (and I have mentioned it on here before, I think, but I implemented more since then).
I also read some books, too.
Also, I have a comment about the pagination on Hacker News. I will want to know how many pages there are in order to quickly skip to the last page. (Really, just implementing NNTP would help. It has a high water and low water number, to easily find the oldest and newest messages. It has a lot of other benefits too, including user-defined sorting, offline mode, etc.)
Learning electric guitar and toying with the idea of making a trainer game/app, primarily for practicing chords. Realtime chord detection is not too difficult for a single person to implement, but at the same time it is not a commodity technology either.
I'm using Rocksmith and Yousician (the free version), but I think there's room to improve over what both of them provide for practice / exercises. For learning and performing songs they're definitely the best due to the sheer amount of content they have.
I'm very early in my learning journey so I'm not concerned that developing a prototype version I could use for myself will take too long (it could be that I'm underestimating the difficulty of the problem). I was already able to slap together most of the "glue" code in Unity in a couple hours, and given my signal processing background I have solid ideas for how to approach the difficult algorithmic parts.
Since you have a signal processing background... what would be super cool is if there was a tool that could analyze all the chords in a song file (e.g., mp3) and magically create a Rocksmith/Guitar Hero style "racetrack" for practicing. DLC can get expensive quite fast, and songs you want to play may not always be available without modding/hacks/cracks, etc.
I'll keep this in mind! It is a tremendously more difficult problem though due to all the other instruments (including voice), distortion, etc. in real music tracks compared to a clean guitar signal. This is when you would have to break out the neural networks. Machine learning happens to be my day job so it's not impossible! But for now I'm keeping my target scope small :)
I've been working on writing a c11 compiler, to x86_64/x64 assembly, currently just finished implementing function pointers and global variables. I still need to implement arrays/struct/string literals/optimisation, so a lot to do, but it is good enough to allocate memory and print hello world. It would be nice if I could make the compiler output binary files, not assembly source, but that seems like it would be a lot more todo.
Implementing the type syntax was I think the hardest part so far, given c’s weird type syntax.
https://github.com/OrangeBacon/mcc
Started on these at mid-March when the recommendation for quarantine came in effect in my country. Most are incomplete and WIP (I love switching back and forth between projects):
- Slack RTM bot which picks up my morning and goodbye messages in our channel and stash the duration into our time registration system so I don't have to do it manually. Using Slack library for Go, compiled to C library using gccgo for C ABI compatibility, then using Zig's cImport functionality to develop the bot in Zig (because why do it the easy way)
- mbedTLS bindings to Zig (Zig can generate alot of this out of the box, but I'm tailoring it by hand)
- HTTP/1.1 client in Zig, ties into the mbedTLS bindings I want to provide TLS support
I'm finally (finally!) taking the time to learn Unreal Engine. I'm actually working on "porting" my favorite board game to it... I began doing that in Unity but I later decided that I should also use this moment to learn something new.
I bought a cheap used HP Proliant ML350p server on ebay for my home rig. 8 cores, 32 GB of memory, and 6X SAS drives in RAID 10.
Run xcp-ng[1] virtualization:
4x VM's running a Kubernetes cluster; three workers and a master.
- Traefik load balancer in the Kubernetes cluster
- Consul in the Kubernetes cluster for Traefik
- GitTea[2] in the Kubernetes cluster
FreeNAS[3] VM
Plex[4] VM
VPN[5] VM
[1] https://xcp-ng.org/
[2] https://gitea.io/en-us/
[3] https://www.freenas.org/
[4] https://www.plex.tv/
[5] https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn
Finally biting bullet and learning react (I've had run ins in the past) by converting a vanilla js handcoded-web (super complicated) app to react. Probably not the best app to learn on as it requires a Mapbox map which means you have to interface with the map api in a very untraditional way.
Was a little new to npm as well, but got rolling after a while. Not done yet, still little issues with flow state, for example, if I have a dual range slider in react with clearly styled and labeled beg and ending sliders values, how do I drag one slider over the other and force swapping the two but continue the UI motion. Currently I'm just overriding the event target.
An app to re-connect with your favorite people you don't necessarily talk to quite often. It combines Tinder-like swiping with a LinkedIn-like profile that only highlights what you do best and are proud of.
I imagine this being used by people to reconnect with acquintances that they really admire, who will naturally start new projects / bands / companies / skateboard crews after learning of each other's mutual admiration.
It's super early stages, but would love to hear from you on hello@gethelden.com if you think it's interesting :-)
I am working on creating a product that performs 'Log Aggregator + Metrics Analysis + decentralized distributed tracking' for blockchain apps. Today's log analysis and metrics applications are focused on providing services to micro service or monolithic applications wheras blockchain apps are decentralized in nature and run across multiple parties or organizations. This creates a challenge when monitoring the system and performing log analysis or distributed tracing as systems span across multiple parties or organizations. I am trying to simplify this by creating decentralized logging apps which work like dApps (decentralized apps)
I am working on a novel. It is the third novel/story I have started since 2016. I will probably abandon it before completion but I am practicing and improving my writing. Eventually I hope be able to write a complete novel. I haven't had anyone review the writing as I am still at the point where self diagnosis and correction is fairly obvious (I make a LOT of mistakes). There is plenty of good writing advice and exercises on the Internet; my writing problems are extremely typical for new writers.
Like my early software, I expect that my current novel will eventually collapse under the weight of inherent lousiness. I will then start again and do better.
The end goal is to provide better secure boot tooling for people. This is exemplified by my sbctl project which aims to make it silly easy to create keys, and sign stuff. Currently it shells out to sbsigntools, but this feels awkward and I'd enjoy some better integration without having to call out to C-code.
I'm working on a pomodoro app. It's called Session. I've been beta testing it for a month to 30 people. Daily active user for the past month is 25% (8 person), so I'm happy with it!
Session focuses on these points: - beautiful design. - analytics: what you worked on and for how long. - introspective: after each session, it'll ask you whether you got distracted. If so, why? - meditative: breathing in and out once at every session.
I wanted to build, as I call it 'Global Creative Community' called Branding Pavilion which is an online directory of companies, events, job offers and interviews from the digital industry.
The idea behind this project is to help clients reach digital/marketing/software companies and create an online community.
Software stack of this project includes: Bootstrap 4 as a CSS framework, Vue.js for logic and functionality, Firebase for database and backend, Stripe as a payment method, Cloudflare for protection and security.
I've been trying to learn LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang) and write a widget framework in it. I've never really dabbled in Lisp, but I'm also reading On Lisp, and it is fun to just stretch the mind a bit and wrap my head around FP. My wife thought I was reading a math paper from how Lisp looks :)
Also trying to clean up https://geo-yak.com and https://yak-mu.com, which are IP Geolocation charts for visitors, and SQL analytics for Stripe. I made both to scratch my own itch, but trying to market them a bit too.
I highly recommend making your own lisp! It's actually relatively simple to do, since parsing a lisp is very straightforward. It's also a great way to learn lisp/FP.
Launched a newsletter https://before90s.substack.com where I talk about what modern businesses can learn from pre-internet era companies. Things like distribution channels, a/b testing, use of influencers were all methods used by those "old companies".... I think there are many different articles telling stories about modern companies and how they are winning in our times. The same is not true for those companies created before 90s though. There are a lot to learn from pre-Internet era companies and apply to businesses and products nowadays.
1) Built a crappy cordova clone of an Android app I used (ThingCounter) to better suit my needs. It helps me track my reps for kata [1] and set goals to meet by certain dates.
2) Built another cordova app which bundles a load of videos I use as reference for training (Okinawan weapons [2] kata), need to compress the videos better, the app came out at 800MB+.
3) Reading through Automate the Boring Stuff to relearn Python
I created an alternative interface to teleconferencing that let's people naturally congregate in subgroups to have sidebar conversations: https://www.calla.chat
I've been working on an app for running trivia quizzes on Zoom. It has a ton of ready to go quizzes and collects all player answers and works out scores.
In the beginning of all this covid-19-craze I (like many others) wanted to get a better view of the numbers and spread of the virus so I created a small app for that - https://coronadata.se - I look at it daily to get an overview of how the numbers evolve, hopefully someone else can have use for it, not that we have to few of these corona-apps :).
Right now I am working on a tiny analytics SaaS that helps small business owners to get KPI:s like Engagement, Retention, Churn and Earnings out-of-the-box with simple integration and some sensible defaults with dashboards etc.
Now that I already have a Step 1 business that I'm surviving on. I'm looking to move up to Step 2 or 3.
I have been reading up a lot on customer acquisition especially from 0 - 100 and also tweeting abt it (https://twitter.com/p0larboy). If anyone has a good resource on this, please let me know.
A book named "The Common Lisp Condition System", to be published later this year.
Abstract: This book is intended to be a tutorial that teaches the functioning and example uses of the Common Lisp condition system. It is aimed at beginning and intermediate Lisp programmers, as well as intermediate programmers of other programming languages. It is intended to supplement already existing material for studying Common Lisp as a language by providing detailed information about the Lisp condition system and its control flow mechanisms, as well as description of an example ANSI-conforming implementation of the condition system.
This seems interesting. I also saw Caddy 2 which seems to have a lot of functions (with handling certs as one) and it's good to have something that's complementary with other software.
Also nice write-up on the 'source available' licensing rationale.
It was actually inspired from HN. I found a site here called helpwithcovid.com and I've been working on a volunteer project with it. It's with a few people from around the world, so it's a nice opportunity to work on something but also with other people so it brings a fun social aspect into things. If anyone's interested, it's called CoCo and it can be found here: https://helpwithcovid.com/projects/719-coco-corona-control-c...
I've been working on https://github.com/hobochild/clementine, it's a self-hosted graphql anayltics platform. Basically a "free" replacement of Apollo manager.
Also starting to work on a slack alternative for small business. I've found alot of companies are using Whatsapp group chats for business and I think there maybe a market. You can read my initial thoughts here. https://hobochild.com/posts/chat
I am slowly re-shelling and modding all of my original portable consoles. In addition, I am building new ones out of parts and bulk broken shipments from ebay - and selling them for much lower than the market currently lists them.
I noticed that the syntax and semantics of Lox and Monkey mostly don't conflict with each other, so I am making an interpreter that does both.
I also made a fully incremental static site generator, but this will probably never be something I can show off because it isn't cleanly divided into "library code" and "configuration for he specific sites it generates." It has no non-incremental mode. You might say "Performance is a non-issue for static site generators!", but incremental builds means you can make expensive operations like pngcrush part of your build without having to wait forever.
I am making bread once a week, trying my hands at making croissants and just this week I decided I would give charcuterie a go. I've started with drying duck breasts but I'm sourcing what I need to make some saucissons.
I'm building https://choremate.co with a working tagline of 'The Best Chore Chart in the World.' Living with other people tends to suck and I know it can be better.
I'm also working on Crisp https://github.com/huumn/crisp which is a cryptocurrency written is Lisp. It's currently a toy meant for exploring, but what I want to do is have the transaction language be designed around spawning subchains. A blockchain for creating blockchains.
As the author of a digital photo and video management system, it pains me to agree with you.
PhotoStructure will get your piles of digital files organized, but it can't guarantee that the disk won't crash, that you have a backup, or that the computer won't go kaput. A printed book on acid-free paper and archival inks can just sit on a shelf and be fine and readable by anyone 50 years later. No technology can say that.
Also: assume the images are irrelevant by default.
Try to write something on the back of each photo explaining why it's relevant. At least write when it was taken. Bonus points for who is in it, and the event.
When my brother and I went through boxes of old photos without annotations of any kind, and not being able to ask who's in a photo, or when it was taken, or why it's important, meant most of the contents were irrelevant to us. Very sombering.
I've also made quite a bit of bread - very satisfying first thing in the morning.
I used the change in routine to put spare time into
launching a specialty coffee indexing site[1]. I've been thinking about it for +1 year.
Still working on the backend and the ultimate goal is to tell you when harvests from producers you've liked before are back on sale (i.e. I liked this coffee last year, what might I like this year), and build a kind of engine to recommend coffees.
(It's also a testbed for ruby continuous deployment with Docker!)
I'm building a web app for sending newsletters with AWS Simple Email Service https://github.com/mailbadger/app. It's still a work in progress, I'm still a couple of features away from releasing a beta version, but basically you'll be able to import your subscribers, group them, create templates and create and send campaigns. After that you can see statistics such as bounces, complaints etc.
I'm using Go for the backend and React on the frontend, along with MySQL and NATS for message queueing.
I'm working a simple online faxing service[0] that doesn't ask for your email, and sends faxing quickly. Not free, but 0.20/page. Still working on converting the in memory db to sqlite. Feedback would be great.
Is there an actual per page variable cost incurred to provide this service? Assuming no, as consumer of these types of services I would like to see a pricing formula that doesn't get so expensive for larger page count documents.
Even something like $1 + $0.05 per page would be nice and solves your micro transaction dilemma on <3-4 page faxes.
I'm too afraid to go shopping, and I don't need to, because I bought a lot of long-life food, including milk.
But I missed joghurt, so I started to make my own, and it's great!
Was finishing it up (and getting really good feedback) just before quarantine started, and now that very few people are leaving their houses, just polishing it up and getting it ready for when everyone is out and about again.
Just a simple (click and go) video monitor for your pets/baby. Click "share" on one phone/laptop/tablet, and you can connect and view it from another. Video doesn't use bandwidth unless you're actively viewing, and doesn't go through our servers unless you require TURN (rarely).
Duobiblo (https://app.duobiblo.com/) allows to practice a language showing chapters of the bible side-by-side with a language you already know. I learn Portuguese currently on Duolingo, which inspired the name. If a browser supports the Web Speech API for the given language it is also possible to let the browser read the text.
I'm on hiatus on my main project due to the virus. I came up with https://unirender.io in my spare time.
It does prerendering of React/Vue/etc SPA similar to https://prerender.com. It functions as a cdn however, so it is a simple dns change instead on integrating it into a server.
It's not as fast as I would like and it's not really tested either. It's gonna be free for a long while. I keep meaning to clean it up a bit more so I can publish it on github
After receiving an email from a Big N recruiter, I decided to spend the last month working through LeetCode problems.
I'm glad I did, because literally every job I've applied for has had some kind of Codility or HackerRank style test - even bog-standard developer jobs have asked DSA-style questions. Yesterday, I was asked a Dynamic Programming question for a full-stack developer role at a bank.
It seems like these kind of interviews are becoming the norm, so I'll probably spend the rest of my furlough time working through DSA courses, grinding LeetCode, and doing daily Codility tests for different companies.
I've finished my Bullet Journal iOS app.
I've never really found an iOS app that allowed me to managed tasks like my paper Bullet Journal (which is to heavy to carry around all the time).
https://bulletweek.app
Also I'm using a lot the timer with my Apple Watch and I needed something faster than the built in timer and I can't every time use Siri.
So I made one fast is more fun & faster as well with multiple mode:
https://primetimer.app
I created a library: http://github.com/SebastienBtr/vue-dashboard to easily create a dashboard app, my motivations for this library is that I didn't want to use a big dashboard template that you can find online, where you always have to do some refactor and remove all the things you don't need. Instead my library just give you a vue component to have a dashboard layout setup. Feedback would be appreciated, and of course, a star if you think it's great :)
Writing a novel about a guy stuck in quarantine who falls in love with another guy across the city, but the only way they can communicate is through making shapes out of light strings and hanging them in their windows.
I made https://rootshirechess.glitch.me (desktop chrome works best atm) so my kids could play chess and have a video chat with grandparents and cousins. I publicized it a little and have been happy to see that several people are enjoying it.
It uses Nodejs, socket.io, chessboard.js, and Jitsi. For a while I was using a 3rd party chess embed but that didn’t give me unique rooms so I rolled my own w socket.io. Now I just have to worry about glitch.me quota. I figured if it gets popular I’ll just do paid glitch.
Posted this on another thread, but posting again here. If you're building something and want help, or looking for an idea to help build, add yourself/idea to this list: https://bmac-design.typeform.com/to/RbA4JL
About 30 HN community members have signed so far. Post your projects and ideas and email/chat/Zoom with the people you find interesting.
I'm putting it behind a form so that recruiters don't jump on and spam message everyone. Keep building + stay safe y'all!
I've started doing some maintenance on my old computers. I just finished recapping my Amiga 1200 earlier this week and this morning I ordered a long T15 torx driver so I can open up my old classic Macs.
I'm also planning on looking into modifying an old digital clock radio I have with and ESP that uses NTP to keep time more accurately but I haven't gotten very far with that yet.
The lockdown is really only half the reason I'm doing these projects now. The other reason is that I moved to a bigger apartment earlier this year so now I actually have space to hack around with this kind of stuff.
Ha ha - I'm such a slacker. It's getting IPv6 working the way I want it at home. Currently I'm playing around with getting the DHCP server to add a AAAA record. I'm actually still using Unique Local Addresses (ULAs) addresses while I figure out how this all works.
Once I've got that I'll play around with the firewall. And then get an actual external working address. But I think I want to keep that ULA.
It's super simple stuff and I move amazingly slowly.
It's also sad compared to other people in this thread who are starting businesses and creating software that will save the world.
I am working on my new year resolutions and learn to invest in individual stocks. I am slightly biased towards tech companies.
Why I am doing this:
- Improve my business (learn about different business models)
- Improve my product sense
- Hearing good CEOs talking at their investors is a great lesson.
What I am building:
- Use Azure to automate stuff and set up notifications for events I am interested in.
I believe there's an error in your cagr function: I didn't look at how it's used too closely, but whenever you see 365 in financial code it's usually an error. It would be more appropriate to use 252, the average number of trading days for US equity exchanges, instead of 365.
I have some questions regarding the article: How are you hedging? What instrument are you hedging with?
Also, how much leverage are you taking on? If you're not selling out any original shares and shorting an equal amount of some other shares (see my first question), you're taking on 2x leverage. As such, you're not really comparing apples to apples.
Moreover, Puru Saxena is not really doing what your blog is describing. What he's doing (at least according to some Twitter posts I read), is holding a market neutral portfolio where the long side consists of specific stocks he likes and the short side an ETF to hedge the geography exposure. Because he's investing in high beta tech stocks, he can lower his beta and his geography exposure through shorting the appropriate ETF. This is a smart strategy, but is only going to work on high beta companies.
Anyways, in general, we do not want to look at returns when analyzing an investment strategy. Instead, we should look at the Sharpe ratio. While I don't have enough information to say whether your results are correct, honestly, they don't pass the smell test. I feel like the EMA window is overfit, your CAGR is being boosted by the use of 365 instead of 252, and I suspect that you are taking on leverage, which might be also boosting your returns.
Also looking at the code, it's needlessly complex because you're dealing with actual shares and such. A better method is to just deal with returns directly and represent your portfolio as a vector of weights, the sum of the absolute values should add up to zero with no leverage.
The type of hedging you describe in your example is equivalent to just selling the shares, but a little worse. You're paying interest on your shorts, so you're losing 2% annually from holding shares and shorting some other shares. There's literally no reason why you would want to hold both a long and short position on a stock.
I recommend you check out Quantopian (https://www.quantopian.com/). It makes your life so much easier and they have all the data, plus great risk models and alpha factor generation tools.
Also as a fellow software engineer interested in finance, you might like my financial blog, https://cryptm.org/.
Awesome thanks a lot for the constructive feedback! There are a lot of things to unpack. Let me answer the question.
> Also, how much leverage are you taking on?
Equal to the value of the portfolio since this how much you need to have 1-1 hedge. The hedging instrument is just short selling the stock.
> Puru Saxena has a different portfolio.
I am inspired by the hedging mechanism that he uses and I started with the same technical triggers.
> The type of hedging you describe in your example is equivalent to just selling the shares, but a little worse.
I see what you are saying and I agree with it.
I am not sure if it is actually worse. Avoiding a tax event on your long position (which in the long run is the most profitable) is actually really important as you more capital to compound.
I know of Quantopian but I have never used and the calculation seemed simple enough to do with vanilla python/pandas. I did not think of using vector of weights, that would be a better approach and much more scalable.
365 makes sense talking interest. But so does 360. And then there's +1/+2. And more fancy stuff. It all depends on currency. So, 365 makes sense from a mentality of opportunity cost and accrual, given an ACT365 currency.
And I wouldn't go with 252 because of OTC.
I also would strongly advise against Sharpe ratios. From the title of the post - which I have my own problems with the post, but - "Why only buy when you can also sell?" really highlights why not to go with Sharpe, or Sortino, ratios: non-normal returns are the normal. Better with Omega, which is a concept already 20 years old but finance oddly sticks to the 80s.
The Omega ratio doesn't solve the problem of non-normal returns. In fact, it makes it worse: The Omega ratio requires a cumulative distribution function of the returns!
I would love to know your problems with the post :) If you got spare time feel free to reach out either here or via email or via Twitter, whichever is more convenient
I have created a website allowing retail investors to track insider stock transactions, for both US and european markets.
Up until now, nearly all websites focused on SEC forms, while making sense of filings in Europe is sometimes even harder.
I cover the US and six major european markets (France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium & the Netherlands), with more on the way.
I have created it with Django, nginx and Postgresql. It is hosted on Hetzner, which I couldn't recommend enough.
The domain name stayed dormant for 6 months, until the quarantine. I created a minimal working product with no design but it works.
This product already exists in the market. But all apps fail at nailing two main problems.
1 - Seamless fast search.
2 - Graphically conveying the sugar measure.
The first one is what I really worked on, to make it fast and intuitive. Still needs improvements. The second one is still a work in progress since I am no designer.
My girlfriend and I just finished the MVP for a live yoga class directory.
See the demo here: https://demo.yogalist.live
It should enable yogis to find suitable online classes but also help out the studios to guide customers to their online offering.
Lockdown is slowly lifted around here but there is still a limit on the number of people allowed in a yoga class.
Stack is based on flask. Took this quarantine time to learn more about container-based deployment;
still battling a bit with cold-start times on google cloud run ;-)
Working on an online version of a party game I designed in college. I figured it could be a nice way for friends to reconnect and get their minds off the anxiety and tedium of lockdown. I want to use the Facebook Instant Games platform, but their documentation has been difficult so far.
Professionally, two different clients have postponed their projects until October, which is getting a bit worrisome. Some members of my team have been advised to propose summer projects that will help automate our engagements, because Q3 will be light, but then Q4 will be a deluge of chaos and demand.
Been helping a 501c3 charity buy PPE for donation send to individual healthcare workers. https://www.humankindnow.org (work is still ongoing. After starting with hospitals/critical zones/etc we've now started with the underserved non 'headline' communities )
Now contemplating a group buy for general public/businesses with the re-opening to top off the work. https://bit.ly/groupbuymasks
We've made a few apps in the past that monetize with consumable purchases (specifically things like virtual currency, extra swipes for a dating app, etc.) and realized the backend we wrote each time for storing user inventory after making an in-app purchase was almost identical. PurchasePoint handles the details of Apple StoreKit and Google IAB transactions to track user inventory for you.
Hand-curated remote jobs in product & UX, from across the web.
Of note: the site and its twitter feed (https://twitter.com/remotivocom) are generated by 2 python scripts which run on a Raspberry Pi under my desk. The 'database' is a Google Sheet and the 'host' is an S3 bucket, both of which are read from and updated every few hours by the Pi.
The site also features no analytics and calls no third-party scripts.
I open-sourced a Python library that makes it easy to offload functions to AWS Lambda. Compared to other frameworks, it's a bit more like Celery instead of focusing on HTTP API.
I am hacking on http://datum.alwaysdata.net/ . It's a feed built out of hacker news comments containing links to data, using Natural Language Processing.
Over the years spent reading HN, I noticed that some comments with the best information ratio, were the ones based on data. I wanted a way to quickly find them, otherwise I would miss them.
Surprisingly, reading that feed has started to be part of my daily routine. But I am still toying with features I have in mind. Feedback would be appreciated !
My first 'modern' website, python+flask+CSS+google app engine!!
It's really a small app, but it was good to discover simple web tech after years of data modelling.~
The app just gives you a comparison of covid death probabilities to skydiving and other activities depending on age and sex. Can be helpful to make personal decisions.
For instance that a 40-49 male, if infected, has probability of dying equal to 75 jumps of skydiving.
I built an Ethereum version of Reddit r/place called https://etherdoek.com. All Ethereum art projects so far rely on storing data off chain. I wanted to show that it's possible to store everything on Ethereum. That way blockchain qualities like censorship resistance are preserved. The canvas will exist as long as Ethereum.
My wife's medical practice always struggles with coming up with a call schedule (weekday evenings, weekends, holidays, etc). So, I wrote a python script that takes in a csv with everyone's vacation/blocked dates, any other restrictions (like max dates they should be assigned) and outputs a schedule (with stats, because previous person doing it by hand raised questions about fairness). https://github.com/asood123/call-scheduler
I've been building a Controleo3 reflow oven kit (https://www.whizoo.com/controleo3). It had all been going well until yesterday when I broke one of the heating elements. Now I'll have to get another toaster oven and do a transplant.
The end goal is to generally improve my ability to prototype PCBAs in my home lab, starting with a CAN gateway module that I've been designing. I'm hoping to be done with quarantine before I get to actually use the reflow oven.
Neat! Do you get paste stencils made as part of the PCBA manufacturing process? How many components a year were you hand soldering or reflowing before you decided to try and automate the process a bit more?
I've done stencils from OSH stencils before, but its not something I usually do. Typically I solder only a few hundred SMD components per year. The oven is less for reducing soldering time and more for increasing part selection; Too many parts come in leadless packages like QFNs that are painful to solder well by hand.
Got it. I have a project that I want to do based on a TI CC-1125 to connect 303 MHz devices in my home to a smart home system, but of course all the interesting parts these days come in QFNs. I was trying to decide whether I wanted to go through the trouble of reflowing it with hot air or if it was just worth the $100 for the booster pack development board. It's unfortunate that the economics of low-volume prototype manufacturing don't work out for the home designer.
Previously, a friend and I launched iprompted.com - a smart reminder app. It has some small traction, despite getting universally panned on HN.
It allows you to create a reminder for someone else, then provides a series of messages, starting with a heads up, the actual reminder and a follow up asking if the prompt was completed. The user can reply and the loop gets closed, you get a response saying the task you assigned was completed.
We've had some interest from developers in using the core api. So, we're using this time to convert the core platform into a api for developers.
I have been tracking my expenses for last 5 years. Almost everything has been accounted for. I made an app to make it easier to do that.
I'm not a fan of giving access to apps like Mint and YNAB was complicated for what I wanted. I manually enter my data in the app and it optionally backs up data to my Google Drive in a Sheet.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ramitsuri....
Designed and open-sourced a custom CNC Aluminum Unibody case for an existing open-source split-fixed mechanical keyboard PCB called the Arisu, similar to the TGR Alice.
Prototypes arrived in record time and definitely enjoying them as I type this.
I am building a wifi enabled remote control for my flat with an ESP32 microcontroller, a 128x64 OLED screen, two rotary encoders and a 3D printed case.
Planned software features:
- detect which room I’m in by strength of various bluetooth devices
- default screen controls Sonos volume in current room with one rotary encoder, light levels of Hue lights with the other
- pushing the encoders to control other rooms
- scope for adding more screens a simple configuration schema
Current status: hardware prototype (inc. case faceplate working on bench power supply, software about 15% done
Incredible reading all these! Definitely motivating to make a bit of progress this weekend :)
We used the time to work on renovating an old historic vault, in order to make it an outdoor vault / barbecue spot.
We actually already started renovating before the lockdown. But since there are not so many leisure activities anymore, now we took almost all our free time to focus on this private project.
The site itself is just based on MediaWiki, no ad-hoc code for now. In the future I hope to be able to port it to AthensResearch: https://github.com/athensresearch/athens.
There are no mobile controls at the moment, and movement is done via WASD keys. There are not many features at the moment since I’ve been focusing on the core engine functionality, but the development process has been very rewarding and educational.
I also want to use this material to write a series of tutorials or maybe even a small book.
I’ve released a side project I’ve been working on for a bit.
I use Notes on OSX quite a bit (and GEdit on Linux...) for gists, reminders, cheatsheets etc... Mainly to re-use code bits and idioms I find useful.
But then I switch computers / OSes quite a bit and I don’t have these notes with me everywhere.
I wanted to solve this problem for me in a way that was compatible with my usual workflow (copy / paste!).
So I built https://www.sheethub.io it is very Beta ATM, but if you find a use for it I'm happy :)
The pandemic has caused demand for oximeters to skyrocket (going from around £10 to £90 in some cases). I've been working on a project based on a the MAX30102 heart rate and oxygen level sensor which cost me only £5. Actually I am simply tweaking the code that someone else has written which you can see demoed here:
It has not been validated by Google yet so you get a big red warning box, but its all client side code.
Basically you get the interface of WhatsApp, but the messages are plain old e-mails. No support for attachments yet, but works perfectly otherwise.
I’m using it myself, its really pleasant to use. It makes e-mail into a less formal communication method.
Working on "Grow a Story". It's based on the old drill/game "advance and expand" where someone starts a story and hands it off to someone else. As a user, you have three actions: start a new story, expand an existing story, or refine.
Refine is the most interesting part, you are essentially editing the transition between two story nodes. The goal is to not add much, but make the transition smoother. Was thinking of capping the allowed delta in some way and requiring the original authors to approve the story "PR".
unfortunately, not yet. I came up with the idea a few days ago and it's just thoughts in a notebook right now. probably start working on something concrete this weekend
Education is very important and I feel like people forget about teachers and how they need to transform towards online teaching.
I see a great opportunity in this fast-growing market.
What do you think guys?
Do you know anybody that could help me share this idea with my target group?
Happy to host a game for anyone interested once I have functional internet restored. Stuck in France and connectively handicapped.
2) Baking cakes !
The best one yet is an almond chocolate cake which functions really well as proper-food-replacement.
3) On the work side I've been helping a few companies migrate to remote work. Improving organisational habits and behaviour so people see that remote can be a positive thing. Measurably.
Smart Sloth is a task manager that helps you be more efficient with YOUR TIME. Smart Sloth uses the concept of timeboxing, which is to allocate a set amount of time to each task, therefore, creating a deadline which can increase the productivity of the user.
A noteworthy feature is that you can open a file by specifying the issue line.
"What do you like about Go?" when asked, I always answer, "easy to make a linter". Thanks to that, a bunch of linters are on the rampage. I've been wanted to try them on the UI in a casual way, that's why I made this tool.
Ended up watching some of the F1 guys play videogames and thought it was kinda funny but pretty stupid. Then I kept watching it... and became a little obsessed. Now it's turned into my time pit (outside of work hours) through a mixture of watching better drivers to learn from them, optimizing my rig and recording setup to allow me to be fully immersed in VR while still capturing video with all sorts of interesting overlays, and trying to mitigate a huge temptation to spend a lot more money on making my setup more elaborate.
I started a blog at https://theforgetful.dev. It's extremely basic. I'm still figuring out Hugo, and my writing style, and everything else. It has been a fun experience so far.
I used to store this info in a private wiki but I'm trying to find a way to do it properly in this format. I did it 99.9% for myself, because if I don't write things down then I forget them. But if it ends up being useful to someone else then I figure that's even better.
I started working on a MyFitnessPal clone, the app is great but some features I want are missing or require a subscription. If any open source project like this already exists, please let me know.
Initially worked on a game very similar to Avalon / The Resistance but using different concepts for good and bad (Firefighters vs Arsonists). Lost interest in this eventually since playing Avalon on netgames.io with friends has been good enough despite a few minor bugs.
Started a different side project that attempts to create a large collection of newsletters:
Very much still in progress, but making something akin to active_storage / carrierwave but for Dotnet (getting familiar with the dotnet core ecosystem). I think by the end of the month it'll be pretty darn usable, but want to add dead simple handling of image processing and similar beyond that.
I've made some good progress on my Dashboard project [1] during the quarantine. Currently I'm (re-)writing the tests from enzyme to react-testing-library.
I've also decided to redesign my Bookmarks app [2] recently - it's now one of my few designs that I'm really happy with :)
I was already speedrunning bread due to parental leave. Got sourdough down to <10 minutes active labor including prep and cleanup.
Now my project is a 1000 science per minute factory in Factorio. I'm 100 or so hours in. It is a game I'll recommend to any programmer: It exercises optimization, planning, testing, debugging, (coaching and collaboration if multiplayer), prioritizing right, and the balance of living with hacky imperfections while still not letting them overwhelm your design and grind everything to a halt.
My coworker and I got laid off, so we decided to play around with React and the Mapbox GL JS API to generate this map of restaurants open for take-out in the SF East Bay (from static data scraped from our local alt-weekly paper). It was really fun and interesting to do.
We're now working on a Reddit clone that uses (again) React and Firestore (for auth and storage). It's just for education, not some planned product.
I had to pick up all the tools for it, and with those I'm on a kick for other craft projects. I have plans for some wooden climbing holds, a raised planter box, a little free library for the neighborhood, a bench.
Woodworking is such a fun hobby I didn't know I liked. I think it's because it's so tangential to tech.
Building a rabbit hutch and nice area for running with protection against predatory birds.
Working with a friend who went back to the farm three years ago - for context at 40 he's the youngest person in the village - on local country cooking, sustainable farming, and promoting the area as an attractive break-away resort to breathe some prosperity into what is a really quite sustenance area.
And of course my non-side project that I decided to dive in to at exactly the worst time in a decade. Oh well. But optimistic on that.
2. split-polygon-demo (https://gavinr.github.io/split-polygon-demo/) - demonstrates the ~4 geographical operations you can perform to split a polygon into n roughly equal area polygons.
I've been working on my novel, and learning a new RPG system. I worked on my novel before quarantine too, but I'm trying to speed up my progress. I wrote 2099 words yesterday.
I've been working on a my new Hacker News client for Android, called Panda!
It's still early days but has the basic features done and the extra lockdown time is definitely helping build out the more needed features (you can't currently log in to your hacker news account but that's coming soon)
I've installed Cat6a in the house and placed a few UniFi access points around. Not much but then my regular job is keeping me super busy. Oh and cooking every meal from scratch!
I always wanted to make YouTube videos but never found time or energy after work. Finally decided to give it a go, and combined 2 things I love: Making music and gaming. So I now make videos playing Geoguessr, writing stories about the places I end up in, and composing songs to those stories. I'm thinking now about adding a programming aspect into these videos somehow. https://youtube.com/lemiffe
This sounds very similar to GeoGuessrWizard's content (which is great by the way). He makes music, plays games and has some great travel/adventure films. Good luck!
I turned my iPad into a graphic tablet for my Linux system as I was in need of taking handwritten notes there. I posted a Show HN a few days ago but it did not get much traction [1].
You can have a look at it here: https://github.com/H-M-H/Weylus
Built a Product AutoExtract API, to extract clean product data from any e-commerce product page automatically, without any selectors or rules.
Most of the project uses off the shelf open source software: chrome headless and puppeteer for rendering, some computer vision algorithms tech and Cloud Run to slash costs for hosting.
Still training the algos, but you can try it our for a spin here: https://crawlify.io.
Started playing around with the VCV Rack SDK, I've made a somewhat functional pitch detection module so you can create V/Oct signal using audio from a real instrument.
Attempting an opensource non-profit moonshot project to reduce student debt and increase salary of everyone involved in that student's education. It is at a very early stage. Trying to get as much inputs from everyone who matters. Details are here: https://gitlab.com/bsldld/s/-/blob/master/README.md
I made an emulator of the Turing Tumble marble-powered mechanical computer where can use to work on puzzles together in real time so I can keep teaching my nephew computer science remotely. You can try it out here: http://tumble-together.herokuapp.com/
It was great to use its development to teach about MVPs, and then he helped teach me some harsh lessons about feature creep!
I started publishing a tragicomic, episodic novel about a group of youngsters that decide to move from playing CoD all the day to develop their own game. It is unfortunately in Italian, but if you happen to understand it, here is the first episode: https://ilsognoindie.substack.com/p/001-la-scoperta (the name means "The Indie Dream")
A platform that brings together people that are mentally struggling with isolation due to Corona with screened volunteers ("Hearts") that have a professional background in psychotherapy or social work (for free). The technical implementation is a huge hack right now but it works and our 50+ hearts are having video sessions with people from all over the world every day!
Archery. Went from worthless to mediocre on a recurve bow. I enjoy shooting at the end of the day a great deal. Plan to switch to compounds soon, maybe even hunt one day.
Using radio.co and will eventually move to Icecast. Would love to check out your station, a friend of mine started one for lofi hiphop — https://loft.radio
I am working on a Linux program that will show you the files opened/read/written by another process (and its child processes/threads). I wanted to be able to run an installer and see exactly what files it creates. Or when LibreOffice magically loads a font that seems to not be on my system, I want to know where it got it from. Basically a stripped-down version of strace that only tracks certain syscalls and aims to be more user-friendly.
As an amateur music dabbler, I've been more prolific musically in the lockdown period than I've ever been. Part of this is that I've also committed to improving, but the other is just getting sufficiently bored to put more time into it. The latest three tracks here were all made within the past couple months: https://soundcloud.com/vaguseques
I wrote a multi-player idle text game for playing on IRC: https://pink-dragon.surge.sh It had been running for about three weeks now. Not too many players unfortunately, but still three ascensions which are automatically broadcast on Mastodon: https://botsin.space/@pink_dragon
Repeter. Forward traffic from a custom DNS domain to my localhost via an ssh tunnel.
Pulumi (like Terraform) stands up the t2.micro ec2 instance, configures nginx, and assigns the dns in Route53, and enable letsencrypt for https. Then tear it down when your down with it. I find it's much faster than the sass alternates, like ngrok.
I was recently injured, but before that and as I recover I'm working on a couple of things.
- I'm making improvements to my small apartment brewing setup, making a lot of beer and doing some infrequent contactless growler deliveries to friends.
- I'm also playing with Phoenix LiveView[1] to make my own home brewing tools to replace the subset of BeerSmith(http://beersmith.com/) that I actually use.
A Plugin for discourse that makes it easier for students to enter Math equations: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-math-editor-user-frie... I also work on other discourse plugins. if anyone wants to chat about creating discourse plugins please send me a message on meta.discourse.org.
Originally I wanted to see some Covid data with my own visualization, was thinking on D3 first.
Ended up with full TICK stack and Grafana, monitoring all devices I have at home and setting up alerts for all kind of silly stuff. Usefulness is questionable, but I learned a lot.
I have now some insight in the local area covid spread and happy to report, no new cases in my town discovered since a month \o/ (according to the government provided API)
Catching up on a few maker projects I wanted to do for some time. Meshroom is a image to 3D model system, I hate taking a hundred photos manually, so cooked up a rotating platform, greenscreen, and some high power LED lights. Most of the work is just tedious wiring, reducing the total number of power supplies, power cables, etc.
Results are pretty good- I can take ~100-200 photos in a few minutes, import into Meshroom, and have a 3D model an hour later.
We do mob programming at work, and one of the main tools we use is a timer. Plenty of apps out there for timing on one machine, not many for sharing the timer. I started spiking out a shared/collaborative timer.
That eventually became https://mobti.me , and it's working well for us. If anyone else tries it, I'd be very happy to get feedback here or on twitter ( @mobtime_app ).
Jot Dot - Its a note taking tool I wrote based on workflowy's style of hierarchical bullets l, but I wanted to allow multiple documents and public sharing of notes (eg. My favorite Netflix shows or management notes etc.).
This link takes you to the public notes section. Not released yet so it's just my notes for now.
I've built a website to help restaurants out in this time. It's called Expoed. https://expoed.restaurant
The idea is that restaurants offer reservation time slots, reserved parking spots, a menu item named after you, or really anything they want in exchange for money from diners. Ultimately, it provides another source of revenue for restaurants during these tough times.
I've been working on a way to find Android apps that don't have ads or in app purchases. There are quite a few high quality apps. For example, just replaced Dark Sky weather app with Geometric Weather. I would never have found Geometric Weather without a tool like this. Would love feedback from the community: https://reallyfreeapps.appspot.com
I've been working on an audiovisual project that gets data directly from Ableton Live and feeds it into my THREE.js app. You can see a couple of demos here:
Been trying to work on a lite "Logging Service" implementation. Something along the lines of Seq[0]. Needs to be extremely simple to use on the cloud and locally. Mainly for practicing more Go which I've come to love. Have barely scratched the surface since I have regular work + a toddler at home + baby arriving in 3 weeks!
Started a YouTube channel, where I show how I work on AWS. Completely unstructured, the video are just a memory dumps in a hope to give some frame of reference to new AWS people, or to give some ideas to those that already know a bit of AWS.
A unified page for math research seminars (and extending to general research seminars): https://mathseminars.org/
Why not use this moment as an opportunity to set up a common portal for announcing and finding research seminars, especially since most are now delivered digitally?
(This is being developed by a group of mathematicians, and I'm not the main dev, but still).
I’ve been working on a scheduling application that will allow healthcare workers to volunteer their time. For instance, retired or at risk healthcare workers who can only video conference, behavioral health specialists. The project got started for a covid-19 hackathon.
I'm working on a project to help people learn languages from reading books:
https://unchart.io/
I've been using machine learning to highlight different parts of speech which I've found makes looking at a foreign language slightly less overwhelming.
My stack is Elixir + React Native + Purescript + Spacy for the machine learning.
I've been working on everypage (https://www.everypagehq.com), a declarative landing page generator - you provide a json file and it will generate a landing page with your specification. its not ready yet but will have an mvp up in about a week. very exiting to be working on something new after many years of only working on day-job stuff.
Working on a dotnet deployment platform to make the backend as simple as deploying a static site.
Point to the repo and let it handle deployment, scaling, and upgrades. Like netlify for dotnet.
Tech wise its hosting it all in kubernetes and building the yaml dynamically. Right now focusing on database support. The challenge is routing from external locations securely.
'thrift stores' is a high traffic search term with low competition and low value traffic. I aggregated data from various store brands and websites and categorized based on locations data. The site is run on Python Flask framework on AWS Lightsail.
I started working through this Bioinformatics Jupyter notebook and found that it is really well put together! If you're interested in working with DNA or proteins with Python I highly recommend it. https://github.com/applied-bioinformatics/An-Introduction-To...
I build something where i can store my image collections into different categories (lots of art atm + some dwarf fortress maps + plans). Drag drop images (or whole folders) into collections. Its not 100% done yet and I am looking for feedback. Sadly normal work has crept up on me and I feel the motivation slowly leaving my body.. :)
Deployed a website/API monitor https://ihook.us. Could be used to extract data in a remote site and send notifications the way you like. By setting up CSS selector, JSON path expression, people can receive daily U.S. Covid 19 total number email/SMS/Slack by crawling CDC site, or monitor Target food supply by hitting their public API.
https://youtu.be/cmETioVtRG0
Trying to build this on a smaller scale using Arduino, 25 droplets. Goal is to make it as cheap as possible. Interesting software problem is how to control many arduino's in synchronized fashion. Stack is C++ Arduino <- serial -> C++ ESP 8266 <- wifi -> server in go and websocket.
I'm creating a collection of written interviews to mainly people in the tech ecosystem about productivity, like how to organize the todo lists, what tools they use, routines, how to manage emails & co.
I always want to know more about how people get things done but it's almost impossible to find high-quality content about it (apart from click baity resources like "what top CEOs do to be more productive").
An app called Mick Tagger – I listen to a lot of music, and this app, which is like a specialized Alfred, helps me more easily manage my Spotify playlists.
I’m one of the 7,400 Peace Corps Volunteers who had to suddenly evacuate from our overseas posts. I’ve organized a group of 59 leaders to support the rest of the evacuees by providing service opportunities. If you have ideas for volunteer tasks and projects (here or abroad) that can be performed remotely, please serve them up. Average PC Volunteer is 27 with above average communication and tech skills. Thanks!
Mamba (https://mamba.black), the Pythonic blockchain development framework. It's like Truffle framework (https://trufflesuite.com). If Truffle is Solidity+web3.js, Mamba is Vyper+web3.py.
Prior to Covid-19, I barely got a time to work on it. Now I have plenty of time to work on it.
http://saasinspire.com/ it's a list of saas inspiration. Right now there are only design listings of successful saas companies, however I plan to make this project as a great resource for developers and designers to create saas products. It will include various interesting articles, design ideas, tools, case studies, etc.
It's a website for Amazon's New World MMO that I started before the quarantine, but I have been able to work on it a lot during this time. So far the project enabled me to use and/or learn: Kubernetes, Discord.js, Twitch API, Nuxt.js (not the main site but an upcoming tool), and a whole bunch of non-coding tasks.
I built 5 no code apps and a hydroponic garden, one of the apps is a companion app for a card game I built pre-quarantine, another one is a decision journal app, one is for tracking my hydroponic garden, one is for curating news for my sales team, and one is a voice app to experiment with. Also in the process of cofounding a startup so built a landing page and a bit of commercial backend (CRM, email, etc.)
I've been diving into Elixir and Erlang, writing a library to build Discord bots with.
I've been toying with bots for a while, but building the library myself gave me some interesting insights in Discord all while learning Elixir myself.
I'm trying to make it so that if you spin up multiple nodes it automatically balances the sharding over all nodes, monitors traffic and attempts to balance the work evenly.
I am developing a integration platform for EDI(X12, EDIFACT) messages to be easily integrated with cloud based SaaS ERPs like Dynamics 365 F&O, BC, NetSuite etc. EDI is a complex piece of integration - diff formats, cryptography, data conversions, etc.
this should be a easy to use platform that can act as a gateway to receive your messages and convert and relay it back to your ERP, backend, etc.
It's one of my smaller apps but seemed to be gaining a bit of traction. Looks like this update has not helped gain new users as the last small update did... shrug
I've been learning the web extensions API and trying to make some improvements to an existing extension that exports a webpage directly to a markdown file (markdown-clipper). I haven't touched JavaScript in a while so it's been great getting back into that, and somehow extensions feel more like 'real software' than SPAs or python scripts, so that's kind of exciting also.
I am in process of launching a web app that lets you plan that trip to Europe you'll be taking when this is all over. Create and share trip Itineraries, show and rank Countries, Cities, and attractions with costs and details. Data is i a beast, its slow currently slow as molasses, but its the first time i've ever put a side project live:
eurotripr.com - feedback would be great as i continue to work on this
I'm a teacher, and these days I frequently need to email the grades to my students. I created a tool where you can upload a spreadsheet containing name, email, grade, etc of the students and write an email template that references those columns. You can try it here: https://sheetmailer.io (you get 30 free emails to start).
I'm working on a project that will allow my wife (who's an iPhone user) and me (stubborn Android user) to have our photos sync together in a shared place without changing our own personal workflows. Tried using Synology software for our NAS but there were some gaps when it comes to the Catalina update and Synology Drive's ability to access the Apple Photos' internal directory.
Tilting once again at the windmills of mechanical CAD software. I’ve gotten further than ever before in the coding, and in past attempts built up good knowledge on topological data structures, mathematics of splines, and solving systems of polynomial equations.
Also doing just-for-fun things like playing the guitar, working on a boat design (and learning strength of materials), biking, cooking, etc.
I have been spending most of my free time on it for a while. It's a chrome plugin that shows random tweets from the user's like list, every time a new browser tab is opened.
A few of my friends have been using this tool for the past few weeks and the feedback is positive so far.
This is my first side project that has reached the launch stage.
A non Electron desktop app for Gotify. It uses Dot Net Core and AvaloniaUI to support all 3 platforms. Looking for Mac testers as I don't have one and honestly feedback/bug reports. It works fine for me atm. Not sure what else people would want.
In some ways, this must be kind of a jackpot for you. How often do you get to study novel viruses like this?? What are your thoughts about it, and what kind of work do you do with it?
Currently I'm working on a) replacing a badly-cracked concrete walkway in my front yard with 2" flagstone which is native to the period in which my home was built and b) installing a 300 ft^2 brick patio in my back yard using a herringbone pattern while setting the pavers.
It feels good to get AFK, feel some sun on my face and improve the value (aesthetically and monetarily) of my home.
(...apart from the breads -- banana bread, cheese-beer bread and home-grown yeast :-|)
I've been working on https://FoundersList.com -- a place for founders to connect, share ideas/posts/launches, connect with professionals/experts, ask questions, find cofounders, events, etc.
Not a project since I am still working full time and vacation is still a little while away, but me and my buddy will be saving the world of Divinity 2 together, while trying to stream it using OBS ( so far I am happy with it ).
Simply put, SuPragma is a tool that programmatically scans your organization with the goal of finding issues that can lead to problems or inconsistencies with culture health and style. Some issues can even be automatically fixed for you!
On the technical side I am working on https://getworkrecognized.com - a work achievement tracker with email reminders (soon) and a nice interface to create Self-Reviews/Brag sheets that will ultimately help you with your next promotion/performance review cycle.
I've been working on a little tool for freelancers/consultants (maybe sales people too!).
It's designed to make it easier for their clients to book a call/meeting with them, saving them the email ping pong to find a time slot that works for both of them.
All: I wanted to make use of this quarantine time. So I have resigned my day job & I have started to build my own tech website https://androidfist.com/. I created this on April 17th with 30 Lakhs+ alex ranking. I worked hard & now it has grown with 6 Lakhs+ ranking in less than a month.
Before starting the fast.ai deep learning course, I made a light pollution map as topography. I channelled the panic about contagion into finding somewhere with low human activity: https://leebutterman.com/light-pollution-topography/
Awesome to see what other people have been doing. I have been getting more familiar with common-lisp and emacs / slime. Specifically using those tools to build a website to track the books that I have read, with the reviews and ratings that I've given them, so my sister and I can keep track of each other's reading lists.
Sort of like goodreads minus the blatant marketing.
It's a book for adult professionals who suffer from ADHD & distractions. The literature for ADHD is mostly geared towards parents or is too scientific.
I'm writing down all of the strategies and tips that I have learned from countless therapists, doctors, specialists, friends, and articles.
1. Intention (https://i.ntention.app) - a todo app where your todos are arranged in a DAG.
2. JSON Viewer (https://json-viewer.io) - a simple web app for displaying JSON reports in a nice UI.
It's been four years since I've got an associate professor position. This quarantine is the first time since then that I found the time to actually do research. I finally started to work on a project I had in mind for years. And I'm glad to say that it's working and the implementation is efficient, and I'm currently writing a paper on it :).
I'm working on gerrymandering. Both parties claim that the other party is better at it. My hypothesis is that some gerrymandered districts benefit the incumbent to the point of actually benefiting the opposing party in the adjacent districts. So, the incumbent has a safe seat, but the net is a loss for his own party.
I'd like to be able to demonstrate and quantify it.
I've gone deep into Go, finding it a fun change from daily work. The project I'm working on isn't ready yet, but I've managed to extract and share my first package[1], for handling and formatting currency amounts.
I created an app called 'Calcula' (iOS - Free) to help individuals strengthen their math skills. Built with SwiftUI. I'm surprised by how much documentation and tutorials are available online!
But it's been really interesting learning the process of publishing an app. Each feature brings a 100 challenges but it's been fun overcoming every mountain.
Some small real problem I faced before: test\validate idea by counting how many times website visitor clicked the certain button. So I automated it with google sheets and some custom script\backend.
Landing is still in progress... Don't kill me for the language skills, English is not my native)
I think I should do this:
Build a fun resume parser
- improving UX of resume parsing when applying for jobs
- auto recommend keywords one can add in to resumes when uploading through an ATS
- just for laughs (seriously though), a bot running through your resume and informing you of your chances at getting past first screen (through a chrome extension)
Raspi 4 "Desktop" with encrypted SSD for root and tiered swap (zram at high priority plus compressed swap on SSD) plus write up. Debian 10 NUC samba file server for my home dir on Mac. Case bound book from scratch. Finish long running migration from Apple Photos to Darktable. Already done: Blurb book of pics of our dog drop-shipped to my aunt.
I wanted to make an all-online Meetup of sorts, a place where people could find and create communities that host events and get-togethers. Got the MVP done in about a week (thanks to Jitsi!) and then had to focus back on client work. I'm still considering next steps with it.
I built Logicboard: https://logicboard.com a tool for conducting remote programming interviews. It's like Google Hangouts + you can write/run code in over 28 languages.
It's kinda amazing how much you can learn building something new, I improved my Elixir, ReactJS and Devops skills.
Been working on https://www.codingtrivia.com. It's an iOS / Android app for preparing for interviews and learning programming skills by playing trivia.
Built it mostly to scratch a personal itch as I wanted a way to be productive and learn in a more lightweight and enjoyable way.
I've been working on a toy Lispy language and self-hosting compiler that targets JS. My goal is to explore building a full-stack web framework with a template compiler similar to Svelte that runs minimal JS on the frontend.
Non tech-related, but I have been building a touring bicycle. Very satisfying to get to learn the standards, choose the parts, assemble. Even builded my own wheels! And now I am fixing my friends bike with the tools I have accumulated.
Getting a little off the computer was nice, plus this summer local bike touring will propably be the only option. Can't wait!
I've been contributing to https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/ lately. It's an amazing distraction-free hand-drawn like sketching app. Online with secure end-to-end encrypted collaboration mode. Check it out!
I've been working on a "newsbetting" site. Basically, you get a de-titled article and have to place a bet whether you think the source has a right leaning bias or left leaning bias. The idea is this betting market will force people to contend with their biases which will then reduce the proliferation of fake news. Theoretically
At the moment I'm using allsides.com[1]. There will always be some dispute about how biased a news organization is, but most people have the general understanding that, for example, Breitbart is more right than the HuffPo. At some point I'd like to add a voting feature, so you're basically trying to compete against the crowd
So really you're betting on what "allsides.com" thinks, not if an article is actually right or left leaning (since there is no objective measure of right/left leaning).
Somewhat. Allsides has a whole system[1] as to how they assign bias which is fairly robust, in my opinion. You're not betting on what the moderator at allsides think a source bias is, you're betting on what all of the patrons at allsides think the source bias is which is a little better.
But you are right in that no one can "objectively" measure partisanship since there is no such thing.
Been trying to complete a project I started back in college: codeexplainer.org . It's nothing fancy, built with a MERN stack and currently trying to get it deployed on AWS.
My hope is that I can integrate multiple languages (only supports vanilla.js at the moment) and eventually allow highlighting to explain "sentences" instead of just keywords.
Updating https://cpechecklist.com/ - a site for US public accountants to stay on top of license requirements. The site isn't really for the HN crowd, but it's been a great experience using Vue/Nuxt on Netlify to serve my static site for free.
I did not get any extra time as both my and I wife work remotely and we're both employed in the tech sector. We got busier as daycare and school closed down(three kids). I invested all my spare time into gardening. I learned how to level ground, how to garden and take care of plants. Interestingly I did not learn anything tech related.
I'm actively working on Remote Leaf for the past few months, to help people land remote jobs during these tough times.
Remote Leaf collects remote jobs from 40+ remote job boards, social media feeds & 300+ company career pages, LinkedIn and send the ones that apply to you.
I am trying to add a few neat math animations to my personal tool "panim", especially implementing boid. (Of course, highly inspired from "manim" by Grant Sanderson, but with a bit different intention).
Physically I've swapped the commute for a reasonable amount more cycling outside which is nice. Mentally went through the AWS Solution Architect associate and professional certifications and ticked those of. Next up will be to finally update my blog and launch a couple of Slack apps all things I've been meaning to do for a while
This is a hyper-niche pain point in commercial LED lighting energy rebate qualification where a manufacture has X number of skus and needs to predict which one will be the least energy efficient. The web tech determines the exact skus based on the technical input parameters given, saving manual time and redundant certified body testing.
I'm collecting insights on the impact of coronavirus on the future of various aspects of our world: https://postcovidfuture.com/ . If anyone took this time to write anything on this topic, please share. I'll be happy to add it to the list.
During the COVID-19 situation where all workplaces and schools were closures. My kids were switching to home-based learning so I made an app for them to learn ABC and counting.
Careers have been put on hold and many people have had setbacks, so I want to help developers find jobs once the quarantine ends and economies open back up.
I'm building a course to show developers how to succeed in the coding interview and stand out during the job hunt.
https://github.com/cnizzardini/cakephp-swagger-bake also combining various other cake libraries into a competitor to api platform for those who prefer to write code instead of comments (annotations) and YML.
I've been learning how various database components work (e.g., log-structured merge trees) by implementing them from scratch and benchmarking their performance with different workloads and configurations. Sharing the results at https://dbfromzero.com
Started a scripted podcast with my little brother about our misadventures trying to get our scripts produced in Bollywood (Indian film industry) and Hollywood. It's called The Content Podcast -- https://contentpod.substack.com/
I have been doing a daily blog to track the return of sports since my startup is in sports and sports are toast right now - https://wherearesports.com/
Feeling a kindred spirit with all my startup friends in the travel, hospitality and live event space.
I'm still undecided on whether hosting it myself or just releasing it as a self-contained stand-alone app (startup script launching a lightweight webserver and opening a new tab in the browser).
There are pros and cons with each approach and I'm making up my mind on the best one to follow
It's essentially a 2D rigid body simulation reskinned to look like a text editor. At the moment it supports basic commands like copy, paste, save, etc.
Also, there are cheatcodes.
I've been making progress with my art project. I made an attachment for my 3d printer to turn it into a pen plotter. And then wrote a bunch of code to turn an image into a stylized CMYK pen drawing. https://youtu.be/Vxd-ndoMD1o
I've been developing a Flight Planning web app for Canadian Airspaces. Includes Weather and NOTAMs. The quarantine has given more time to invest into it. Currently working on authentication and better filtering of NOTAMs
Started it on the side few months ago to help my own job search, there is still a lot of work left to improve data quality and completion, and also add more data points which will help engineers.
I'm working on an Arduino Pomodoro Timer. I wanted to do a little electronics project again and this is something I find useful as it helps me to stay focused.
I made a few digital Montessori tools for my wife and her students. Somewhat unexpectedly, it's seeing about 15k visitors per day: https://montessori.tools/
There's a lot more I would like to build, but "real work" takes priority.
A shelter-at-home helper tool to avoid overspending time away from home (using wifi info, not GPS location, to protect privacy). Sends local notification every 15 minutes* to remind us to keep distance when away. (*configurable)
Been working on a CLI tool for stock trading since I tried to look for one and it doesn't seem to exist. Was also a fun excuse to get more experience with Go and try out the Cobra library.
Besides that, lots of more involved cooking and baking projects to fill the time. I'll come out of this ready to be a stay at home dad!
It's pretty simple, it uses alpaca as the brokerage account and will support buying, selling, and viewing stocks. Any other features I'll add later based on feedback/my own experience.
Not quite ready to put out the repo link publicly but you can email me at andrewnegri1 [at] gmail [dot] com and I can send it to you
I've been struggling to find time, but when I do I've been trying to get a good family-room video chat setup going.
Ideally, Apple would just release a FaceTime-compatible camera I can plug into my TV... but until then, I'm working towards a small HDMI connected device that I can control with my phone (running Jitsi).
If it ever gets back in stock, the Portal TV is great for this. Follows my kid around during the weekly chats with her grandparents. I know a lot of HN is pretty anti-FB, so depends on your philosophy, but it's a pretty cool device.
Yeah, I agree - it looks good, but it is Facebook :) The auto-following is a pretty neat feature though! I might try and pick one up to play around with when they're back in stock.
The real sticking point for me, apart from the lack of stock, is that I never call anyone using WhatsApp or Messenger. I'd ideally like compatibility with other platforms. I figured I'd start with Jitsi as its open-source, and go from there
I did briefly look at how I could get FaceTime working on something, but I think it involved jailbreaking an iPhone and getting access to the SSL certs.
I've been working on an iMessage API, been able to learn a ton about Node.js in the backend. Website is built with React: sendblue.co
Has anyone else been perfectly ok with the quarantine? I can learn, build, explore, and I don't even have to interact with anyone. I guess seeing friends is nice, but I don't miss it.
Building a real-time vídeo pipeline for recording and augmenting paintball matches from multiple viewpoints. Basically transforming and combining the scenes into an overhead view with markers for remaining players. It’s a good break from the day job and it has me diving deep into the math behind computer vision.
Well it was going to be my internship, but that's been pretty much cut. So I plan on doing some sort of ML / Data Mining project at some point. Actually gonna be working in a small group of other college students / grads whose internships were nixed and are trying to build projects for the summer.
An app that let's you track details about your day and your sleep, and then runs a bit of AI to try recognize trends in what may be affecting your sleep positively or negatively.
https://home-trial.losttech.software/ - randomized at-home trial for vitamins and other remedies, that could help your body manage COVID-19 without ending up in a hospital. (requires registration with email only)
Ever since I have been juggling work, family and the whole COVID - I have not been get a lot of time, but I've been working on a Python library to parse Colfer files.
Right now I'm finally getting back to a chip8 emulator now I've figured out what I want to do for the GUI.
After that? I'd like to build up more of my (so far still private) personal website. Good excuse to learn more JS (and more modern JS). Maybe have part of the site be server based, learn more flask
Hey there, I've been working on unusual whales! I'm trying to sniff out "insider" trading and alert users. There is still a lot of work to do, but so far, good progress:
I made a covid tracker in my spare time. Havent done much to it lately it just self maintains itself. It uses cloud functions to scrape a bunch of sites for info on a whole bunch of regions:
https://www.covidus.com/
Once WFH started to take over many workplaces, I created a modern sort-of TFLN (texts from last night) to accomplish another goal of mine, to learn Node/React. Let me know what you think!
Since I read stuff in the internet every day and I forget the interesting stuff all the time, I started to record my "bookmarks": https://rumpelsepp.org/stuff/bookmarks.html
I made a simple website for parents to browse things that your kids can get busy with, that's basically like a "list of things", but is organized into different pages (categories).
That's great! I'll be sharing that site with my homestay family, who have kids aged 6 and 9. On Monday this week I asked the older one to read a Wikipedia list of Disney films and Dreamworks Animation movies and here's the list she made, which you can compare with the ones on your site:
Alice in Wonderland; Toy Story 3; Incredibles; Pinocchio; Lion King; The Tale of Despereaux; Winnie the Pooh; Maleficent; Cinderella; Frozen; Frozen II; Moana; The Santa Clause; Coco; Pirates of the Caribbean; The Princess and the Frog; Brave 2012; Beauty and the Beast; Born in China; The Boss Baby; Abominable; Trolls World Tour; Gift of the Night Fury; Shrek (all); The Grinch; Book of Dragons; Kung Fu Panda; Puss in Boots; Dawn of the Dragon Racers; Marooned ; Prince of Egypt; Peter Rabbit; Aladdin 1992; Aladdin 2019; Shark Tale; Wallace and Gromit; Chicken Run; Bee Movie; Turbo 2013; Home 2015; Captain Underpants; Tangled 2010; Harry Potter; Despicable Me; Despicable Me 2; Minions; The Secret Life of Pets; The Little Ghost; Waking Sleeping Beauty; Cleopatra in Space; My Neighbour Totoro
Thanks! The website lists all of the "watchable" movies by all popular (and not so) animation studios, including Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, Ghibli, etc. and it has almost all of the animations listed, except those that got 6 or worse ratings on IMDb. I thought this is going to be useful especially when you don't want to go search and browse dozens of webpages on what to watch or listen to or do... and it's highly optimized, even though it can be slow because I don't use CDN (but blazingly fast in Europe).
You've also listed movies (not animated) which I didn't add, yet. Probably need a different category called "Movies" and the current one rename to "Animated Films". But I'm already working on other things (a different project), and suddenly don't have time to maintain this project (it's not dead, though!), because I'm bad at advertising and probably no one knows about this website's existence :') Thanks for recommending it, though! I'll figure it out
Kind of a circular activity, but I'm working on an app to help me be productive in quarantine. Planning on making a "Show HN" announcement in a week or to, but for now you can find details at: https://txtodo.app
I'm working on open-source automated machine learning python package https://github.com/mljar/mljar-supervised that can produce markdown reports and produce ML explanations
A realtime collaborative writing suite. Documents, Novels, screenplays. Everything is validated by schemas, and there are hooks throughout.
I find the tech really cool - google docs like. Fine-tuning the end UX at the moment. If this is something you'd use or try out, pls ping me: anil.verve @ gmail.
I wanted to mess around and learn some new techniques. I created an app that will help you decide what to do while on lockdown. Users can submit their own ideas to the pool.
I was laid off about a month ago. Last week I purchased the domain covid-story.com (theres nothing deployed yet).
I want a a basic crud application that allows users to log events in their life by date, journal, or more blog in longer form the day to day experiences they've had during the pandemic.
I built https://playit.gg. It's similar to ngrok or Cloudflare but for self hosting game servers. It tunnels the connections for your local server through one of our public servers. Has a good little following.
I'm building a Jackbox-like web app [0] to support audience participation in live improv shows - OBS/projector overlay and audience suggestion management to begin, with future interactivity planned.
I’m making a privacy focused asynchronous Video sharing app. It’s end to end encrypted and uses Blockstack’s blockchain for identity and storage. Yet to finish it. Preview is available here. https://VideoFace.io
I've been working on a phone check-in system to help small businesses social/physical distance their customers by having them wait in their cars instead of sitting in waiting rooms or standing in lines.
I've started a Rust framework for writing Max/MSP externals (plug-ins, compiled object). Still a long way to go before I get to the actual DSP part, but has been pretty fun so far. Really hoping it would lower the bar for writing your own externals and make it more fun.
Adding automation and code coverage to my c++17 libraries I've been refining. I've used them for years but never spent the time to polish them, it really does seem to make them feel more substantial when the CI completes on a commit with tests and coverage in the green.
I have been working on a no-code website creator tool during this time. https://myquicksite.com, lets you convert your Google Sheet into a website. Its still in beta stage, need to hear feedback and improve.
Mine is a tiny bahasa indonesia to english dictionary using wordnet - https://dictionary.lana.school, helps both with learning a new language as well as building something new with the free time.
I coded an app to help artists and small entrepreneurs monetize their work during the pandemic. It allows to charge for livestream easily by selling tickets. (Only works in canada at the moment)
I've discovered the world of fountain pens! I purchased a TWSBY pen, Pilot ink, and a notebook with Tomoe River paper. I feel like I have been missing out on a truly wonderful handwriting experience for my entire adult life. I had no idea pens could be so enjoyable.
I made site [0] to appreciate all of our front-line workers whether they be nurses, doctors, truck drivers, grocery shop workers — all of them. Just my small appreciation for them.
Time series ML model for each state combined into a US forecast. Models are generating static assets, front end is in React, everything is hosted on S3 behind Cloudflare.
I'm working on a tool that links technical documentation to code. The problem: product specs/technical docs are often out of date with the implementation.
If anyone is interested in sharing their pain with this, I'm all ears and would love to brainstorm! Email in my bio.
Built a simple WebGL landing page for an older iOS project where you can wear President's faces in AR. Most of the work actually enough went into optimizing load time... still some room to improve.
Community driven movie recommendation app - check it out https://www.movvio.com
Now the biggest challenge is to how to get ppl to subscribe for Early bird access while we are finishing the app :(
As a developer, I'm curious to know how 'Step 3' is supposed to work compared to other ways making recommendations.
One of the big problems I have with recommendations is recommending things I've already watched. Netflix used to be so good at the start, now my tastes are just pooled in with what everyone else is watching now.
So, when you join the app, you will go through onboarding flow where we try to understand your movie genre interests, as well as, you can opt-in to give suggestions in the future (this way you become part of community). So, once you submit a request, app will send those request to selected ppl from the community asking for a good suggestion. Once they suggest movie/TV show/series, you will be notified and will be able to pick those that you like/dislike. App will try to understand who are ppl from the community which suggestions you liked the most and in the future will connect you profiles similar to those people. That way you will have your unique path. The main reason for this is when we did PoC most of the participants stressed that they take suggestions from people they know and share similar taste. But again, we are in stage of releasing our MVP, so I'm sure there will be more things to learn :)
Hey, why not subscribe for "Early access" and help us crack that part :)
I’m working on a fitness platform, enabling you to find people to workout with either in your area, or with someone who shares the same interests/fitness levels as you. Super early stage, we have some designs and a landing page which you can check out here:
I built a website where users can subscribe to receive daily text messages with an inspirational Bible verse. It is for USA or Canada residents. https://versefrombible.com/
Gardening, when weather permits. Have 7 old raised beds, 16X4. Been doing carpentry (rotted boards), hoeing, amending, raking. Some plants in now, which was too early as a late frost killed 4. Off to the nursery today to replace what got frozen and plant again!
Working on Horizon Project where a bunch of engineers mentoring freshers in getting their job. Kinda Google Summer of Code. For the interested folk's https://www.horizontech.dev
Building a chrome extension to block spoilers on youtube. Got frustrated with "Spoiler Protection 2.0" since it doesn't cover the thumbnails. For some type of contents (ie combat sports/MMA), the thumbnail basically gives away the results.
I was an active Palm user, Life Balance was my task tracker of choice, so much so that for a while i tried to run it on PHEM on my Android phones. (Don't ask. Ouch.)
I'm trying to reimplement it with personal mods, in C# to start, and likely do something in Xamarin.
I have started a book club software when the lockdown started, dint put much time into it. Still need to put a couple of days to make it an MVP. https://www.pustak.io if you are curious
I've been building a silly little idle/incremental game. I've wanted to make this for years and finally found the motivation. In early access now, hoping to release soon.
Possibly unrelated but I would pay $ for a one-click earnings call app. Type in a stock ticker, get the most recent earnings call in an audio player in one second.
Thank you, great insight, I'll give it a thought.
I want to have a focused, narrow scope for the MVP, but I think finding and digging (public!) financial information is a mess currently, even with all the apps, blogs, yahoo finance and the likes out there
I've read a lot about mindfulness and the benefits of it recently. So being an engineer, I had to build an app. Minimalist way to get started in mindfulness https://sanebrain.app
I've been optimizing an old side-project of mine: https://online-solitaire.com/. As you can probably guess from the URL, it's a solitaire card game site.
1. Aggregate all ebikes for sale in Iceland on orflaedi.is
2. Started Awesome Reykjavík, a community project to make moving
from abroad to the capital region smoother
3. Quit consulting and started something new: planitor.io
I am restoring old teak wood garden furniture. This involves cleaning and sanding the wood, polishing brass parts, and replacing the fabric if there is any. The results are absolutely stunning. It's not that difficult but a bit time consuming.
I am making new habits and routines effortless (or at least way more effortless). I've been repurposing a writing app I threw together for myself years ago, now using it every morning to remain consistent in my routine and track performance.
I'm curating resources, like digital tools, articles, new with remote jobs on a free newsletter, publishing weekly. https://remotejobscenter.substack.com
Kretes (https://kretes.dev/) - a boilerplate on steroids for building full-stack TypeScript applications faster and without accidental complexity whenever possible.
Strengthening my lungs. I've had a persistent cough for over 6 months, and decided that with a respiratory-based pandemic going around, I ought to do what I can to get rid of it, or at least strengthen my lungs while I have the chance. So I've picked up running and cycling, and have gotten more exercise in than I have in years.
And after deciding to pair it with some calorie monitoring, I've gone down almost 5 kg since C-19 started!
I've been prone to long persistent coughs and colds ever since I was a kid (I'm in my 40s now)... until about two years ago... when I started diligently vocal training 30 - 60 mins a day.
It's crazy how much of a positive effect it's had on my overall health. I've only gotten sick twice in the last two years, both lasting no more than a few days. (Compared to many times a year, typically lasting 2 - 4 weeks.)
I don't know if there have been any real studies done on this, but my hypothesis is that vocal training works the whole respiratory tract, improving blood flow, strengthening lungs, and flushing out toxins regularly. Whatever it is, it's quite amazing.
I stumbled on this side-effect entirely accidentally, so I don't know. But you can start by going to youtube and looking for some daily vocal exercises.
I'm a cyclist myself, which is one reason I don't have a quarantine side project -- I've just stepped up my (indoor) training. I'm stronger now, measured by functional threshold power, than I was before COVID-19 killed all my group rides.
(Well, for certain values of "stronger" -- I'm MUCH better at shorter intense efforts modeled on the trainer (say, < 90 minutes) but obviously I've lost some fitness for longer efforts (the week before we locked down here, I did an 80 miler with some racer friends).)
What are you using for calorie monitoring? I've found MyFitnessPal to be very useful, mostly b/c it has a huge library of food in it already. My wife used it to alone to lose about 30 pounds; just the act of watching calories in/calories out is super helpful.
I'm on MyFitnessPal as well, and completely agree with the food library! Though it's a bit of a pain that there's a lot of incorrect data in that library -- mostly typos or mistakes from whomever first input the data.
Nice on getting stronger! I did my first 50 miler last week, and it's got me thinking that I might want to find a group once this whole thing blows over.
Thanks! 50 is the gateway to being a serious rider, so yeah, you're gonna want some cycling groups to play with when COVID is over. And you'll LOVE it.
I live in a big town, so I have multiple overlapping groups, which is a wonderful thing. One club is called "Tap & Pedal" -- we meet at a brewery (there are LOTS in Houston), ride a brisk 50-60 miles, and then relax together after with some post-ride refreshments.
Something I've found about cycling is that my cycling friends are a VASTLY more diverse group than the rest of my social set. I'm an upper-middle-class white 50 year old dude of the NPR persuasion, and our normal social set reflects this.
The cycling crowd is all over the map in terms of ethnic background, education, level of political engagement, income, and age. It's only through that that I really even KNOW 30-year-olds (or 65+ year olds).
The big tent pole for cycling organization in Houston is the annual Multiple Sclerosis ride every spring; if there's something like that where you live, it'd be a great way to find a home group.
In a single ride. I think there's a psychological barrier there that some people have trouble with. 50 also means more than 2 hours in the saddle, so you're moving in the direction of serious mileage and well past the 10-20-30 mile easy rides.
I have/use a Saris Fluid Trainer I picked up at a local REI with my street-tire equipped mountain bike. I should really be using it more, but there's precious little space left anyway.
Most serious cyclists have an indoor trainer device that attaches in some way to a regular road bike. This sounds like a hassle if you only have one bike, and it kinda is, but the thing about cycling is that you eventually have more bikes.
So for me, my old bike is more or less permanently mated to the trainer, which is a Wahoo KICKR Snap.
Trainers used to be devices to impart resistance - a heavy flywheel cranked down to your rear tire, essentially - with no intelligence attached. Crank it down harder for more resistance.
In the last several years, that's changed, so the dominant type now is a "smart trainer" that has the ability to dynamically adjust the resistance when driven by an external computer, and measure actual power output.
This is good because cycling training is (to drastically oversimplify) generally predicated on various types of intervals all expressed as a percentage of your maximum 1-hour power output ("functional threshold power," or FTP). Say, a warmup at 50%, then alternating intervals of 2 min at 180% and 3 min of 75%, or somesuch.
With a smart trainer, I can just keep my cadence constant (usually about 90-95 rpm) and the trainer will get easier or harder as indicated by the training plan's instructions from whatever device I'm using to drive the trainer (I use an iPad; some folks laptops). I don't have to do anything to the bike or the trainer to adjust the resistance; it's handled for me. This sounds small, but it's really pretty great.
This intelligence also allows for "virtual cycling" routes in apps like Zwift (Win/Mac/iOS/Android), which model real-world locations for you to ride through. The trainer gets harder as you go uphill, and easier as you go downhill, and it factors in your weight and power output to model speed. It's pretty neat (and immersive enough that, even with an iPad screen, I have found myself wanting to lean into turns). There are even races in Zwift (I raced last night, in fact).
Since cycling as a hobby/culture is really tied to the idea of the group ride -- an activity that has been pretty seriously quashed by COVID -- you can imagine that smart trainers and Zwift subscriptions are selling like HOTCAKES right now.
There ARE now full-scale dedicated trainer bikes designed to do all this (Wahoo makes one), but it seems to me to be kind of a rich-man's-folly approach. (Wahoo's model is $3499.) You can do so much with your old bike (free, because you already have it) and a trainer (Wahoo's line starts at $500) that I'm not sure I see the point.
Tools like Peloton really address a different market, i.e. people who really love spin class. That's a good workout, but it's not a cycling workout; Peloton bikes in particular also lack the ability to dynamically adjust resistance, so you can't get the same kind of immersion over a virtual course or hands-off interval workouts. They're neat and lots of people love them, but it's a different market. OTOH, if you just seek a nice indoor fitness device, they might be a good all-in-one option.
I dont want to frighten you or anything but the last time one of my friends had a persistent cough for 6 months it turned out to be cancer. He caught it early and got it treated.You should get it checked up with a doctor just in case.
Agreed. I did get a chest x-ray about 2 months after it started (and the rest of the cold symptoms had gone away), to see if there was anything there. Nothing found yet, but I am due for another check-in. This is a good reminder to do so :)
Congrats on the weight loss! I too had the same thought, my wife and I have been weight lifting and rowing every other day for the past 2 months now. We have gotten in much better shape than we were before, and it relaxes us too.
I have been making things with masa flour. Tamales, bocoles, tortillas, and pupusas. So far the pupusas are my favorite, and very easy to make. From scratch, I can prep, cook, and eat in less than a hour, so it's ideal for a lunch break.
Team of 3 building aggregator for online car ads in Latam country. Target is to make a transparent price listing based on actual online offerings. https://carropedia.con
So much stuff.
New raspberry pi 4, that and..
...Exploring Alpine Linux
...Exploring NixOS
...Exploring Lightweight Linux Containers/VMs
...Writing a Hacker News Crawler
...Continuing my sometimes-paying (wx)python work
I wrote a video-integrated online poker game to try and mimic in person home games. It was easier to build than I expected using Twilio, Firebase, and React.
A latex "preprocessor" that lets you use some markdown while writing latex (so that all sorts of \textit don't get in the way of your thoughts), and also allows pure markdown documents to be compiled into PDFs using latex.
Working on an appointment management system, eventually with video chat and team management features built in. Been a wild ride so far just getting availability working!
I'm trying out building a board game modelled after Blokus in TypeScript with online functionality enabled by websockets. I have a group of friends who enjoy the game so I'm mainly making it so that we can play together :)
Trying to create a mouse mat from tōtara wood, by cutting it into thin diamonds and gluing them together. It's been tricky to get the slices properly flat with the tools at my disposal, but it could be an interesting result.
Launched Widgetery.com (A Product Hunt-like widget for lead capturing) yesterday. Still have to learn a lot of things on making such kind of widgets, however it was really fun to build. By the way, any feedback is appreciated!
Growing veggies! I tried my hand at starting a small vegetable garden. So far we have tomato, cucumber, and zucchini seedlings, and are planning on planting carrots and beets once we finally stop getting snow (Ontario).
I built a really basic typescript react design system for my personal toy/mess around web apps. It was a great excuse to learn how publishing an npm package to github packges works and learn more about styled-components.
Don't pay somebody- learn how to do it! For what you'd pay somebody, you can buy a soldering kit on Amazon for $15 that includes solder even, and works just fine. And then Youtube the rest. The capacitors themselves will be cheap, and I'm sure the online Amiga community could help you with sourcing them and learning how to do the job. Electronics is a fun hobby :)
I picked up my first open source maintainership: django-address.
Did my first triage release to pypi this past week. Learning about adding CI and all kinds of things about what it means to maintain a package on a popular web framework.
I have some ideas of static sites but instead of using an already made static site generator, I have decided to write mine from scratch, because why not. Learning Go, I picked it for the task (even if Hugo is awesome)
A distributed simulation framework for Python based on Kahn process networks, intended to provide support for design automation based on a novel hybrid of statistical techniques (including DNNs) and rules-based AI.
I switched text editors and window managers! kakoune to textadept (which has been great) and i3 to awesome (which I'm still getting the hang of). I'm thinking about switching from chromium to luakit, too.
a cool feature would be to toggle the graph scales to logarithms of any arbitrary base, in order to track the exponential growth rates based on what the current infection-constant-number is
I took up the French Horn to get away from the computer. Surprisingly cheap to rent from an appreciative local business, and it’s been nice focusing on something artistic and separate from my career during lunch.
I've been trying to learn about AR by making some kind of tool to let people understand social distancing (sort of took a break from this). The other thing I am trying to do is make music using Logic Pro X.
I'm creating a declarative language built specifically for UI designers. The idea is to allow designers to describe a UI in a platform-agnostic manner while preserving their own verbiage and mental models.
Great question! You're not being a debbie downer, that's a totally reasonable thing to ask.
Sure, lots of UI designers do. But it isn't a process that scales. If you're trying to define design requirements for a product that's very large or distributed (i.e. Netflix), manually drawing pictures of a UI is simply too slow.
Some designers have taken to writing CSS, and some even prefer it as their main design tool. I think that's awesome, but CSS exposes lots of implementation details that are only relevant to the web. I'm trying to create a declarative syntax that feels as easy as CSS, but exposes lots of functionality that would normally require javascript. And it will be abstracted from the platform, so this would serve not just web designers but also iOS/Android/TV/etc.
I'm investigating the way that encounter difficulty is estimated in Dungeons and Dragons. I've felt for a long time that the influence the number of opposing monsters have is somewhat exaggerated.
Capitalism has trained us to equate productivity with our self-worth. So please don't feel the need to be constantly busy during the pandemic. You are enough, regardless of what you're building / making / cashing out on.
Having said that, if you're truly interested in a project and it keeps you engaged, go for it and I hope you're enjoying it!!!
I've finally gotten around to working on a idea of mine, the ability to clip podcast segments and share them. Still figuring out some stuff but the beginning stages are looking and feeling great!
I've starting picking back up the piano. Currently working through Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag and Beethoven's Moonlight (1st movement) after taking years off.
Flutter is pretty great. Code development is faster in my opinion when compared with React Native. Dart is fairly similar to JS but that's probably the biggest learning curve.
I'm working on a CMS that stores its content in a plain JSON file directly into your Git repository. That allows easy CI/CD integration, version history, multi-branch support and more.
Started building my own tool for TTRPG/worldbuilding/... note-taking, partly from wanting to do it, but mostly because solutions like "Google Docs" didn't scale well...
I'm learning how to do my own book keeping. The yearly tax declaration will still be done by a specialist but keeping the books will be my task from now on. I am using ledger-cli for it.
Working on a development project surrounding user engagement with content creators and having users help drive the content that the creators come up with. (although it isn't ready yet).
In the back of the Dragon Book, they recommend a Pascal compiler because of it being a very structured language. I've been building it out, and I'm working on codegen right now.
I taught people web development mostly friends and cousins, to help them discover this as a career opportunity.
And I got better at cooking, I'm thinking to open a restaurant soon.
Get last failed logs from github actions, with native image build (i found it is quite annoying to go to UI and scroll it each time :)
https://github.com/zarkone/faillogs [kotlin]
Trying to improve my home-made pizza bases. There's only so far you can go without a dedicated pizza oven, but I've gone from "bad" to "decent" at least.
I've been taking some time to improve my dev experience. I've been writing some scripts for common tasks and setting up aliases, getting to know VSCode shortcuts better etc.
I've been making tabletop game to enter into competitions (there are lots running!) and my significant other has been experimenting with making home-made ice-cream and sorbet :)
I am getting to know the local birds, growing 2 plants and learning machine learning. Soon, hopefully, I will start building some side apps using ml and maybe teach it to the birds.
Options trading robot, it is currently doing ok in simulations but I am too scared to give it real money. I have never written so many tests for such a small amount of code before.
You should be. I hedged a bit recently with some options. Options can be low-volume, so the bid/ask spread alone can kill you. Read that bit again. If you're not accounting for the spread, you might get killed. They're also incredibly volatile right now. I've had days +/- 30%. I'm not sure if someone like Robinhood goes lower, but a contract is for 100 shares, so the min bet is big.
Yeh your right, It’s programmed to not mess with anything where the bid ask is >3%. Otherwise yeah, it would get eaten alive. It uses a combination of unusual options flow and some basic technical analysis to make trades and has been doing well so far but... it is easy to lose a lot quickly if ya blow it.
Keyboards. I bought a mechanical keyboard and customised it, then I handmade a little mechanical macro keyboard and now I'm getting into the custom cables scene as well.
We've started building a platform to help landlords and tenants come up with installment plans for missed rent and security deposit payments during C19.
www.xspaced.com
Well... I'm creating a pet/toy game engine inspired on DIV Games Studio, with D. And I resuscitate two D packages. A simple VFS and a fluent assertation library.
Learning touch typing. I've never been 100% on typing without looking at the keyboard when going fast, and I think that learning to do so would boost my productivity.
Another useful skill that I’ve found helps is getting good at reading from a source and typing it as you go.
When someone’s presenting, I can quickly type something they’re showing. Usually quicker than interrupting, asking them to copy & paste and then waiting for them to get on track.
Another is if for some reason you get sent a printout, an image or something, transcribing whatever you need from it is super quick.
If it’s too fast I don’t internalize what it says, I just type, but it’s nice.
A personal story,
My grandma and my mom where both secretaries. I used to sat down on the typewriter at home for fun. As soon as I did and started typing you would hear, “back straight!, hands!, feet on the ground!”
When we finally got a computer, it died a bit. They couldn’t hear the keyboard when I typed so I had some time to slouch before they walked in and saw me.
That’s of course if I remembered to turn off/down the speakers when I booted the computer up.
Ah, definitely. I'm in a work-from-home situation right now, and have been trying to type things during video calls (being careful to mute my audio and not show the typing on video, of course). I can imagine that within two weeks, I'll be at least at my old speed, if not far faster.
What are you using to learn and how are you finding it?
I ask because I myself am working on a touch-typing course for developers[0] because I wasn't satisfied with the other options available. It's one of my two quarantine projects.
Ah fair enough, I used that to learn natural language typing and thought it was great but then found it lacking for learning to touch type when coding. I'm taking a lot of inspiration from the design of typing club though.
Working on a pure email group challenge product. Basically you sign up with friends to complete a challenge and the product is almost entirely delivered through emails.
I've been working on personalized web archive/crawler and search engine to manage my bad data hoarding habits. Inspired by the look and tech from the 90s.
I started to learn Greek. And I am trying to learn enough Blender to animate a fictitious TV show's logo to help my SO for an university project of her.
I am studying for the entrance exams for graduate school in statistics here in Brazil.
But it is quite tough to study math on my own, specially for exams.
clquery, a SQL interface to cloud resources. Using SQL and tables to interact with AWS (and eventually others) makes it easier to quickly query and join across various resources and services without needing to remember how to make and parse the underlying API.
Mostly soldering, building audio gear from kits. Two Neve 1073 microphone preamp clones and one UA 1176 compressor clone (still working on the second).
two main kinds -
1) one (more practical, i.e making sure that the side projects actually hone my existing skills - still deciding between building another CRUD app or just brushing up on my ds/a more -- any advice?)
2) exploratory (trying to build a scraper for entertainment venues and creating a map based visualization for public to use when the covid-19 measures are eased in my country)
working on a AI for poker - we've trained some agents on a 20 card deck version of hold'em poker and they're not bad at all, now working on scaling it up to the full 52 card deck no limit hold'em
https://github.com/fedden/poker_ai
i've been trying to write a plugin for obs studio that allows you to embed lego build instructions in your twitch stream, using magickcore to convert pdf screens into obs textures.
i think the final plugin will be generic PDF slideshow media source embed, so it can be useful for more than just lego.
I'm working for the Azimuth Project modeling the Coronavirus and deploying a new math web server for them.I'm learning Category Theory at https://categorytheory.zulipchat.com/. Both are projects supported by mathematician John Baez. The Azimuth Project is righteous as they supported the copying of climate data from the US government when Trump came into office.
I've been doing more of a product-ish role in my dayjob, so it's nice to do something (relatively) well-defined, where it's easy to tell if things are working, but still challenging enough to be fun.
When the lockdown started, I noticed I had a two food-related problems:
1) I was used to stopping by the grocery store more or less every day on my way home from work so I had no habit of planning ahead for more than a few days at a time.
2) In order to fit a week+ worth of food in my apartment, I had to distribute it between a few nooks and crannies which made it difficult to track what items I had where.
To help transition to my new once-a-week shopping schedule, I used Trello at first but that quickly grew unmanageable. So I decided to spend some time to build myself the right tool for the job. I realized other people may have run into the same issues I had so I tought I’d release it to the App Store.
I’m also feeling completely okay being in the quarantine and actually much happier. I feel like I could spend a really long time just exploring projects, books, learning stuff etc. and don’t even want the bits of social interaction I get with work meetings.
I'm building a simple analytics tool for client rendered applications (mostly SPAs). The idea is to make it possible to track user action on the client side (through URL changes and button/link clicks and form submissions), without requiring a developer to go through and add event tracking everywhere, while also not collecting information that would require GDPR/Data Privacy notices to be accepted by the end user.
Doesn't have a website or even a working MVP yet, but if anybody is interested in giving it a whirl when it's 'ready', my email is in my profile.
Not really a fund, more a play on funding within. It's a framework for companies to let their employees start companies internally, to be spun out. Been slowly working on it through pioneer.app. Inspired by lots of projects at big companies that are great but just don't fit.
My GitHub contributions have gone from 6 months of grey nothing to a forest of green, I think I'm using it as a coping mechanism.
Since my gym closed down, I decided to make a clone of the app it had been using for posting Workout of the Day and logging results, to keep learning more Flutter and try Firestore for the first time - I developed it entirely on Android but this is me trying it on the iPhone Emulator for the first time:
I've learnt so much from doing that, including implementing a signup/login flow with Firebase Auth, using Firebase Storage, how to get fancy with custom screen transitions in Flutter, how to implement, uh… that thing where a sticky UI element slides in/out as an overlay when you scroll down and up again - does that have a specific name?
I also went back to the basic Flutter VLC Remote app I wrote for myself a while back and having been adding as many features and as much polish as I can for the sake of learning:
I'm in the middle of redesigning its controls, having just figured out how to implement a nice full-width slider which acts as a floating divider between the playlist and controls. I've also started breaking out individual Flutter things I'm learning into a Codepen collection (titled with phrases I failed to find help with when searching for these things myself): https://codepen.io/collection/nqpzvz
I also brought the React/Preact/Inferno toolkit I created in the pre-create-react-app days back to life after an 18-month hiatus, by finishing the Babel 7 upgrade branch I started in January 2018. Despite what they say about the JavaScript ecosystem, Babel and Webpack were still at the same major version as when I stopped maintaining it!
It now has support for using the experimental build of React, the new automatic runtime in Babel's React transform which depends on it and the latest hot reloading implementation, which has come on leaps and bounds since I was away. Here's a recent demo of one of the main features I keep it around for:
I accidentally took a head-first dive into TypeScript type definitions and back into writing Babel AST transforms - a particular phrase ("host elements") in a tweet about not being able to use HTML attributes in React gave me an idea for a new major version of a Babel plugin I had written to do basic class → className and for → htmlFor transforms on JSX attributes:
It now lets you use _all_ HTML attributes on host elements in JSX, and I ended up spending too much of a weekend forking the React type definitions off the back of it, to add support for using all numeric and boolean HTML attributes and transforming them to the form React expects.
I've always wanted to learn some Lua, as my kids love Roblox and I'd like to try making games in Roblox Studio with them some time, so I wrote my first ever Lua script to do a fun thing in OBS:
At the start of April, Twitter broke my extension for making it halfway tolerable, so I went back to maintaining that, making it capable of stripping even more crap out of your timeline and making the separated Retweets timeline it adds to Twitter more robust:
I also dove much deeper into Gatsby than my previous experience with it of cloning and tweaking a blog template, as my wife needed to set up a marketing website quickly for a new business being spun out at her work. I've ended up with a setup which is easily reusable for the next site, easy to edit for non-technical users, and is zero cost for a really decent amount of functionality (mostly thanks to Netlify).
I even went back and resurrected my (OG) React Hacker News API client and added a new feature: a new story list containing every item you view the comment thread for, displayed in reverse-chronological order for ease of reading new comments on them:
I've been continuing with Concise Encoding [1], which is a twin format for storing/transmitting ad-hoc hierarchical data (similar to JSON).
Key points:
- It has a binary format (smaller) and 100% compatible text format (readable). Machines work in binary and convert on-the-fly only when a human needs to see or modify it.
- Supports all of the basic data types needed on a modern system.
c1
// _ct is the creation time, in this case referring to the entire document
(_ct = 2019-9-1/22:14:01)
{
/* Comments look very C-like, except:
/* Nested comments are allowed! */
Note: Markup comments use <* and *> (shown later).
*/
// Notice that there are no commas in maps and lists
(metadata_about_a_list = "something interesting about a_list")
a_list = [1 2 "a string"]
map = {2=two 3=3000 1=one}
string = "A string value"
boolean = @true
"binary int" = -0b10001011
"octal int" = 0o644
"regular int" = -10000000
"hex int" = 0xfffe0001
"decimal float" = -14.125
"hex float" = 0x5.1ec4p20
uuid = @f1ce4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000
date = 2019-7-1
time = 18:04:00.940231541/E/Prague
timestamp = 2010-7-15/13:28:15.415942344/Z
nil = @nil
bytes = b"10ff389add004f4f91"
url = u"https://example.com/"
email = u"mailto:me@somewhere.com"
1.5 = "Keys don't have to be strings"
long-string = `ZZZ
A backtick induces verbatim processing, which in this case will continue
until three Z characters are encountered, similar to how here documents in
bash work.
You can put anything in here, including double-quote ("), or even more
backticks (`). Verbatim processing stops at the end sequence, which in this
case is three Z characters, specified earlier as a sentinel.ZZZ
marked_object = &tag1 {
description = "This map will be referenced later using #tag1"
value = -@inf
child_elements = @nil
recursive = #tag1
}
ref1 = #tag1
ref2 = #tag1
outside_ref = #u"https://somewhere.else.com/path/to/document.cte#some_tag"
// The markup type is good for presentation data
html_compatible = (xml-doctype=[html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" u"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"])
<html xmlns=u"http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang=en |
<body|
Please choose from the following widgets:
<div id=parent style=normal ref-id=1 |
<* Here we use a backtick to induce verbatim processing.
In this case, "##" is chosen as the ending sequence *>
<script| `##
document.getElementById('parent').insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend', '<div id="idChild"> content </div>');
##>
>
>
>
}
Sorry if description is too long, but I had this text already.
HTTP/REST Interface for Desktop APIs
The Problem
Web applications are cheaper to develop and cheaper to maintain, than desktop applications. Many tasks which were considered too heavy for the web in the past, are implemented with web technologies now. Microsoft Excel Online and Google Sheet for spreadsheets, Figma for graphics design.
I have worked in large enterprises most of my career. Many enterprise/business applications I have seen could be web-based, but were not, because they needed access to various desktop APIs. I'll focus on three use cases here.
Authentication, Authorization, Audit
Web-browsers give no direct access to authorization, authentication and audit APIs provided by operating systems. Windows workstations are usually joined to an Active Directory domain. Permissions are managed by group membership within the domain. Hundreds, if not thousands, of groups and policies are serving usual enterprise. Restricted logon hours, whitelisted logon workstations, centralized collection of audit log. Every desktop application may call a few simple APIs to check if current user has specific privilege, is a member of some specific group, just lists all current user groups, or writes an important message to the event log. But good luck integrating this with your new fancy web-based SaaS. No single sign-on for you, no event log. If infrastructure is hybrid and the cloud part is Azure, you may have some luck with SAML and Azure Active Directory, but if not, you most likely will be asked to install on-premises version or leave immediately.
Printing and imaging
Web-browsers provide no usable printing APIs. Printing is important, whether it is cheque, report or handout. Most websites just give up on printing and export PDFs. This experience is terrible, starting with color support and ending with A4/Letter confusion. If printing is an essential part of your application’s workflow, like for a cash desk, web technologies are simply unusable. Google Cloud Print is discontinued, so the situation will become even worse. Scanning with preview? I don't even know where to start. It's simply impossible.
Industrial devices
There are a lot of industrial hardware devices. None of them can be accessed from the browser, if not explicitly supported, like FIDO tokens. Most can be accessed via text-based protocols over serial ports. They are begging to be wrapped into web-sockets.
Why is it so bad?
There are two answers I know:
First answer is “other priorities”. Web technologies are mostly for landing pages, not for business applications, so a new CSS selector is more welcome than industrial devices.
Second answer is “security”. It is hard to introduce new features without introducing new attack vectors.
The Proposed Solution
Create a universal windows service application which will provide a highly secure, easy to use REST interface. Allow JavaScript applications to fully integrate into desktop environments.
Security is paramount. Permissions, which website has access to what APIs, should be opt-in only, clear, managed by Administrators only and optionally by global Active Directory policies. Everything is double checked, secured, isolated and sandboxed if possible.
I've been hiking in the government reservation around my town. I live near Eglin AFB which has almost half a million acres of land and about a quarter of a million acres are open to the public with a permit. There's easily over a thousand miles of trails going through the woods and the vast majority of them aren't on any official maps. I'm cobbling together a u-blox EVK-7P GPS receiver with a USB-C hub and battery bank that supports USB-PD passthrough to a phone hooked up to the hub to log the raw GPS observations from the u-blox receiver as well as log the sensor data from the accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometers in the phone. After a hike the idea is to post process those observations using a nearby Florida Department of Transportation reference station as a base station in order to get accurate positioning after the fact. (should be on the order of centimeters) The u-blox receiver also supports measuring the doppler shift to each satellite as well which should give me not only position but direct velocity measurements as well. Combined with the accelerometers and gyros in the phone I should be able to use Google Pose Optimizer (If anyone knows of a more up to date sensor fusion library please reach out to me) to combine the results into a fine grained and highly accurate track of each trail and publish some of the trails online as KML or GPX. The part that's pretty up in the air is taking the raw track and combining points of interest with the track and combining overlapping paths where I doubled back on a trail. My basic plan is first take all of the raw positions and times and construct a continuous non-branching path that accurately shows the actual path I took and then iterate through it from start to finish constructing a new path and check to see if the point I'm sampling from the raw path is already nearby an existing point on the new path and if so, skip it and start a new branch when the path diverges.
The other side project keeping me busy has been setting up my desktop as a multiseat computer both at my desk and on the living room TV for my son to play some emulators, Minecraft, PBS Kids games, etc. As luck would have it, the length between the back of my PC and the HDMI input on my TV through the cable management arm, wall, closet, baseboards is juuust short enough that a 25ft regular passive HDMI cable will reach. I've got a Monoprice two port active USB extender hooked up as well going to a webcam mounted on top of the TV and a Bluetooth dongle that's mounted just barely peeking out from below. For a controller I picked up a bluetooth Xbox One controller and I'm using xpadneo as the driver for it on Arch Linux. That plus a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse are the only HIDs out in the livingroom and the keyboard and controller are rechargeable. It's better than any console and wound up being cheaper as well and it's expandable for e.g. one of our latest favorites of playing Hans Zimmer's "No Time For Caution" while playing SpaceX's ISS docking simulator with the goal of docking before the song ends.
That last side project has also expanded into some Minecraft modding working on porting an old mod that adds Joypad support to the PC version to more modern versions of Minecraft. Right now he's still pretty unfamiliar with using a keyboard and mouse so controller support is a must which really limits the mods available because that basically pins me to Minecraft 1.12.
I have been all over the place, never able to focus much. I'm keeping very busy, perhaps to ignore the insanity. It's been awesome working from home, I've missed it so much! Being here where I don't have IT rules that are cumbersome at best, I can easily just install a software package to try it out. I've been a bit stultified by the job for many years now, and am only just catching up on learning new tools, mostly by doing a crash course in setting them up and using them. To date, I've
- Setup my own personal webconferencing server (https://bigbluebutton.org/). I did this on Digital Ocean, which I'd never done before, but I couldn't provide the necessary bandwidth or hardware at home. It's really opened my eyes to having someone else host the infrastructure, but I still get the sysadmin control I crave, plus it's cheap and just so fast and easy to spin up new machines.
- I setup a phone number with SignalWire to hook it up to the webconference server as a dial in. That turned out difficult, so I quickly turned it around when it came up in my mountain rescue group that we had a need for a more customized replacement for GroupMe. I now have started working on an interactive system to manage callouts to missions.
- I went to setup a Gitlab server as a support tool for developing the aforementioned project (and other future projects), but it turned out to be quite resource intensive, so I learned to spawn it in Docker on my main development machine at home, along with a runner to do continuous integration.
- I finally got around to replacing my internal dhcp/dns/time/print/file server with something that uses an eighth of the power, produces much less heat, and is very quiet. It's so much nicer to have a quieter office.
- I've been working on updating my old library of code templates/snippets, including adding new programming languages. This project I also use to test out the Gitlab instance as my goal with the templates is to have things that are self-contained, but run a number of unit tests.
- I'm looking into RFID/NFC for a small project with my brother. He and I are also discussing a project using UE4. Hopefully I can find a way to cheaply host the Gitlab instance, or maybe I'll just end up paying for an account with them or Github, which I've also been learning how to do CI with and comparing with Gitlab.
- Since I'm also a member of a big band, I've been getting into home audio recording and mixing, using Ardour and Audacity (for click tracks). I'm hoping to get enough musicians on board so that we can make our own version of the Reddit Symphony Orchestra.
- So many other things! https://disaster.radio/, SDR, putting more holds on the climbing wall, trying new recipes, etc.
I've been keeping so busy I forget to eat (down about five pounds) and have been skipping exercise, but it's just so fun! I do wish I could muster the focus to work on something big, something worthy.
I have been working on a new website for my ten year long music project, Sonic Multiplicities [0]. It's a real-time audio performance application for solo instrumentalists, which uses LSTM and MFCC discrimination to provide a totally contact-free improvisational musical AI.
Despite having built this and painstakingly tuning a custom linux-rt system for optimal audio, building websites seemed to always escape me. I think quarantine has finally allowed me the time to understand the conventions of making static webpages for browsers.
One reason we have to be careful about not allowing it is that we let some people do it, it will lead to a flood of promotional comments, which would definitely not make this place better.
Back in school I remember my most effective drive to learning was my desire to develop video games. It reinforced physics, vector math, and systems design.
I've been working slowly towards a nebulous design I have for a quantum puzzle game, that maybe I can help myself and others develop the intuition needed in this budding field.
Nothing to show for it, but it's a long road I'm a few steps down, and I'm enjoying the scenery.
I've built a quick Slack app to receive Calendly notifications (I've asked Calendly what their plans are regarding slack and they were happy with my "contribution").
Unfortunately, it relies on their webhooks, which work only for Paid and Premium users
Cocktails! I read the Death & Co book and it inspired me to create a site to house all the recipes (and hopefully more eventually) and track which ones I've made.
Thanks! I want to do a redesign actually but too many other things on the plate..
Right now related are just manual actually. I planned on creating some type of graph and computing some type of distance but not yet. Let me know if you have ideas :)
It's written in Python (Django) with Postgres and just vanilla JS on the frontend. Looks like yours too?
Yeah, mine is driven by Django Rest and an Angular app for the UI. I'm seriously considering moving to React, though. I just use Sqlite for the DB layer because it's easily performant enough.
I used Drink & Tell (and its sequel Drunk & Told) for the primary source of recipes, which I can't recommend more.
The "related recipes" thing is interesting. If I stick to doing it with a sql query, then I think an algorithm to pick out the base spirit, then filter on that and on whether it's shaken/stirred/scaffa, then sort by common ingredient count? Then again, an Elastic Search stack can do related objects out of the box, but I wouldn't want it to get that complex :)
I haven't tried standing yours up yet but will tomorrow! Do you have all the Drink and Tell/Told recipes as fixtures? Or just a few?
Your repo is nice and clean, definitely learning from that, and your model design.
Any reason you haven't deployed as a web app?
Oh and for related.. an issue is that sometimes related recipes are really quite different (e.g. an old fashioned riff with Gin and St Germain, or tequila/mezcal) so would be tough to automate..
It's deployed alright, I just don't publicize it since I only intend it for personal use.
None of the D&T recipes are fixtures, since they're technically copyright material. I set up classic cocktails as fixtures for people who want to spin up their own or play around with the repo.
Did you try standing it up locally?
Yeah the related cocktails thing is definitely an interesting problem.
There is some decent information out there about it including open source solutions and many good papers (unfortunately some paywalled) and I've been working on a very primitive prototype, but I've been pretty distracted. I've also ordered some books on VLC, digital communications that cover theory as well as some more applied ones. I do hate how many of the books are either textbooks or associated with standards that seem to make them very expensive.
Unfortunately sooner or later, I'll have to face my extremely weak math ability, which I'm dreading.
Behind that I have a ton of side projects backlogged ranging from more digital communications and hardware stuff, to retrocomputing projects, to some ML stuff I want to try.
Another side project born out of this post. I've listed all possible links from this post across pages and listed down here. https://born-out-of-covid.f22labs.com/
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